001the chair calls to order this public hearing of the scottsdale unified school district number 48 governing board on june 22 2021 the time is 5 pm the chair will have a roll call starting from the chairs left zach lindsey patty beckwith julie sanowski john michael greenberg all five board members are present and there is a quorum the board will now move to agenda item 2c public hearing on adoption of proposed fiscal year 2021 2022 expenditure budget pursuant to ars section 38 43102 and ars section 15 905 d e notice is hereby given to members of the governing board and to the general public the governing board will conduct a public hearing on tuesday june 22 2021 at 5 pm at coronado high school 7501 east virginia avenue scottsdale regarding the adoption of proposed fiscal year
0022021 2022 expenditure budget dr menzel thank you president greenberg and members of the governing board tonight shannon crozier is going to go over the final review of our expenditure budget as you know we've had conversations ever since january with respect to how this is unfolded and we're looking forward to the final presentation and board action members of the board dr menzel and guest tonight we are taking a final look at the expenditure budget for next year we've been looking at it since january it's been changing since january and it's going to continue to change as the state has not adopted a budget yet so part of this is based off of student amounts from last year or this current year so it will change again but it should change to the to the better hopefully
003so with that because the state hasn't adopted a budget yet the base level remains the same at 4 359 we do anticipate that going up once the budget is adopted from the state so we will come back in september hopefully and present another budget revision that will have the new dollar amounts in it this is the sixth year of prop 123 which was enacted several years back which was to deal with the state funding where the state hadn't funded appropriately so it's part of the lawsuit for that part of it this is the sixth year of it continues until june of 2025. it fluctuates depending on adm we estimate it to be somewhere around 1.4 million again it'll depend a little bit this year was higher because of less adm throughout the state but we
004anticipate that being at about 1.4 million for next year teacher experience index is decreased but it decreased really slightly so it's it is a small decrease it does make a little bit of an effect but we're still in is still in a decent range of 1.0264 and then the last part which is really great news is that this year our da or district additional assistance is fully restored that's our capital fund so that makes a huge difference for us as well for being able to provide capital needs to our schools a couple of the budget summary highlights for this year classroom site refund increased significantly for next year and there's some additional changes that are taking place so it went from 425 dollars per student to 733 which is huge part of that is one-time
005monies 192 dollars per student so when we look at how to use those funds we got it we have to be careful because some of that is one-time monies but what we'll need to do next year is meet with sea and discuss how that how we can appropriately distribute those additional funds out in addition classroom site fund changed so that it now includes more of the categories for our for our student supports still only for certified however it includes now social workers um guidance counselors instructional support staff those those type of staff so we have more that can can now receive that which is a great thing too so we'll be working with sca and how that looks next year and how to deal with those additional funds and working through those new monies this
006is also the fifth year of the capital override so we'll have that until june of 2024 so we will need to by for sure do an uh election for that in november of 23 if we want to continue that thankfully capital overrides don't decrease like mno overrides do so we'll continue the full funding at eight and a half million until june of 24 when that will expire so we still have that additionally we were able to provide raises to all staff we had set originally a two percent for certified and classified one and a half for principals and aps and one percent for district administration however at the last board meeting we realized we had additional funds additional carryover from what we anticipated and so we were able to increase that for all of our
007staff so that becomes now four percent for certified classified uh one and a half i'm sorry two for principals and aps and one and a half for all other administrators uh going into more of the detail there we are covering all in insurance benefits for our district employees that also includes the dependents so there's no increase to our staff for their benefits for next year medical insurance those types of things we're covering that for them additionally we have the two million that we set aside in cash accounts to reduce the balances we'll continue that and we've added two more million into those cash accounts to get those accounts down which is also what's helping our m o budget so we can provide some of those raises we have contingency for student loss that will change
008again depending on what the state budget actually ends up looking like provided that our adm stays stable where we think it's going to be then once we have the higher dollar amount from the state from the budget we'll have additional resources so that if our our adm is off from what we anticipate it being for next year we have a little bit of a cushion in there to provide for that and then we carried over quite a bit more um into our budget for this year that's actually what's kind of bridging the gap since the state hasn't given us the final number on what uh per people will be but in looking at what we're doing and moving some of those things to cash accounts we think we can look at how to do a
009better review of our compensation and hopefully correct some some of the issues that we know are out there so we'll be looking at that as well and hopefully have the funding to address that in the future this just takes a look at what our budget was for this current year where we anticipate it for next year again that number should hopefully go up but it gives us about a seven million dollar difference which is how we were able to provide additional resources to to compensation this is just taking a look at where all of our budget comes from as you can see the bulk of it comes from mno which is essentially salaries and benefits utilities and then supplies and services but it kind of breaks down as well where some of the other funds
010are coming from the next biggest group being other funds is made up of cash accounts so that's a big chunk and then bonds and some of the other smaller grants within our mno and i think this is important so that we know that we're spending we're putting our money in the right place within our m o for function 1000 which is direct classroom instruction we've got 56 percent of our budget for mno budgeted to instruction when you include student support and instructional support those are the supports that go into the classroom like social workers guidance counselors um registrars instructional aides those types of things when you add those all together that puts us at 71 of our budget for classroom and classroom support so i feel like that's a good that's a good highlight for
011us it really does so we are trying to put as much as we can in the budget towards those towards the direct classroom instruction um so that just breaks down within mmo where we're spending funds within the capital budget which is our next largest budget um the the bulk of it really goes to technology technology is expensive we we have really focused on trying to put money into the classroom with software with computers one-on-one devices we're going to be replacing devices for staff next year so there's a huge well half of it is uh within technology and then another large portion with furniture and equipment instructional aids and textbooks and then lastly this is looking at the fiscal or i'm sorry the tax rates for the future i want to point out that the prior
012years are the actual the 2122 is an estimate we don't actually set the rate that's set by the board of supervisors additionally i did it based off of a higher number anticipating that we'll when the budget is is done we'll have additional revenue that comes in i didn't want to i didn't want to do the estimate based off of the lower budget number and then have this per pupil amount be higher but the great thing about it is that we are continuing to go down with that tax rate so that's a great benefit for for our district for our community but so that is an estimate but we're generally pretty close on the estimate so we anticipate that being 3.4965 with that that is the budget for this year questions thank you are there any
013board member questions or comments board member beckman um that we are addressing those cash flows um in particular it's important to know that from the trust cash perspective again that the increase is which is that is correct we are not we did not pay this year we are not paying next year into this property casualty fund we have balances in there that can address that we also we had a self-insurance trust board meeting last week where we talked about minutes setting minimums and maximums for those accounts and what is the appropriate amounts one of the things with that self-insurance trust is you know we look at that and say well there's millions of dollars in there i can't move expenditures into those accounts to pay all i can do is not contribute as much to
014it from our m o one of the things we're trying to really be careful about and balance is i could not fund 11 million dollars for the medical insurance which is great that would take our balance down but then next year i'm going to have to pick up that 11 million dollars and so what i don't want to do is create fiscal cliffs that we'll have to deal with in the future so we do want to bring those down we just have to do it slowly and incrementally so that we don't create a situation where we bring it down all of a sudden and then and use 11 million dollars for salaries and then now i've got to cut 11 million dollars out of my budget the following year so we're trying to do it
015kind of methodically and and slowly so we can extend that out for years and we don't create a huge fiscal fiscal clip so we're doing that with those we're also continuing to look at the cash account balances within indirect costs mips some of those other flexible accounts to again slowly bring those balances down which is why we've moved again the additional two million dollars this next year into those accounts to start to bring those balances down yes thank you board member hart wells thank you shannon for all your work and your team's good work this has been a bit of a moving target maybe a little bit more so than previous years thank you and i would just like you to clarify the classroom site fund has statutory restrictions on the use of the funding
016if you could just clarify for the community why you referenced the teachers specifically with respect to the classroom site fund and that's not fungible money so you could just give the community a little bit behind so classroom site fund was actually approved by the voters gosh it's been i'm going to say close to 20 years ago it does have restrictions on how we how we can spend those monies they've changed they were more open originally and then it became tighter the money from that comes from sales tax so it's really driven by one of our sales tax if we're having great years then you see higher balances given to the schools during the recession when things were tight we saw those balances go down and what we can provide to the schools but it is
017restricted in what we can do use those funds for it's used generally for teachers and guidance counselors that happen to have their certificate for teaching certificate with the changes for next year that will open it up so that it'll still have to be for certified employees however it will open it to other categories besides just a classroom teacher toa guidance counselor with that so it'll open up to more staff which is great i will say part of that also means when you have the pie and the pie and how many pieces can go into the pie when you put more people into that that does change things a little bit and what we can do like say performance pay-wise but we have so much more given to us this year that i think that'll still
018balance it out but we do have quite a few restrictions on how we can use the classroom site funds so there were some changes this year to the classroom site there were three funds and now there is one fund yes and that's lending to what you're talking about in terms of some flexibility we have a little restricted we have a little bit more flexibility we are actually because the change came so late in the year we had and we'd already set up rolled over for next year's setup payroll for next year we have opted to to keep so each teacher is paid by by part of the classroom salary or classroom site fund so we've kept it with the three buckets for this year knowing that we could then work together with sea to implement
019a better plan moving forward into the future instead of rushing something through right at the end of the year so we can still continue to use those three buckets but it's technically we only need one required too thank you very much yes are there any other questions thank you the board will now move to agenda item 2d public comments approval of adoption of proposed fiscal year 2021 2022 expenditure budget this will be an open call to the public anyone wishing to speak may speak you will have no more than three minutes and it must be germane to the budget that is proposed today for approval with that said is there anyone who wishes to speak and come to the podium and speak about the budget specifically oh please state your name for the record eric
020herland uh governing board i worry about this classroom site fund just for the fact that it was no longer voter protected so it was supposed to expire in 2020 for 20 years the legislature extended it through their own house and senate so now it's no longer voter protected so if a flat tax passes per se revenues then decrease and they want to get revenues back into the system they are able to take it throughout the classroom site fund caution will rogers thank you very much are there any further comments public comments with no further public comments we'll move to action item 3a adoption proposal fiscal year 2021 2022 expenditure budget are there any further comments or discussion i would just like to note that this year and last year through esser and sr-3 that's for
021one two and three we've been greatly benefited by the federal government providing additional aid and this is aid in addition to what the federal government provides our school district and school districts across the state of arizona and our nation every single year this year in addition to the esser funding we have a proposed budget of 39 million dollars from the federal government so if you consider the 15 million dollars that we're able to carry forward and remove that if you reduce the federal funding we get um we would actually be making budget cuts and not be able to provide the amazing opportunities to the students that we get to every single year so i just want to make that point as well because the esr funding has been very beneficial to our students this year
022with that said the chair moves to approve action item 3a adoption of proposed fiscal year 2021 2022 expenditure budget as presented is there a second second vice president zanowski seconds it is moved and seconded that the board approved action item 3a adoption of proposed fiscal year 2021 2022 expenditure budget as presented are there any further comments or debate all those in favor say aye hi hi the motion carries 5-0 and the budget is adopted the chair moves to adjourn this public hearing of the scottsdale unified school district number 48 governing board on june 22 2021 the time is 5 19 p.m is there a second second vice president sunowski seconds it has moved and seconded that the board adjourned this public hearing at 5 19 p.m all those in favor say aye aye the motion
023carries 5-0 and the meeting is adjourned the chair calls to order that the chair calls to order this regular meeting of the scottsdale unified school district number 48 governing board on june 22 2021 the time is 5 19 p.m vice president sinowski will you please lead us in the pledge of allegiance yes i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands the chair will have a roll call starting from the left zach lindsey libby hart wells patty beckman julie sanowski john michael greenberg all five board members are present and there is a quorum the board will now move to agenda item 5d approval of agenda uh it has been proposed that we table items 10 b 14 and 15. this is because uh the
024litigation team that was coming to present on us present to us about the jewel litigation presentation that would be an interesting one we're not able to make it so that will be tabled and moved to august and we have had a request to pool item 11l that is iready expansion to elementary schools are there any further amendments to the agenda the chair moves to approve the agenda as amended is there a second board member hartwell's seconds it is moved and seconded to approve the agenda as presented is there any debate all those in favor say aye aye aye the motion carries 5-0 the board will have a public comment section tonight originally it was planned to limit the comments section to only 30 minutes in total as a result of the executive session and litigation
025discussions we had tonight because that is no longer on the agenda we will allow for full public comments and hear all the public comment cards have been submitted tonight the board will now move to agenda item seven student and staff recognitions and celebrations dr mental are there any student and staff celebrations there are none this evening thank you we will now move to agenda item eight superintendent's comments dr menzel thank you president greenberg vice president sinowski members of the governing board just a few quick comments this evening so that we can move on with our agenda first last week i received a let's talk dialogue that was indicated that there had been a rumor circulating among a group of parents in our community that following the may 18th board meeting the board met in secret
026and approved crt for our district i think it's really important to be clear that the governing board did not have a secret meeting we follow arizona's open meeting laws that we did have a properly reconvened meeting on may 24th that was held virtually so we can complete the district's business and there has not been an agenda item with the topic of critical race on it it's not been considered or brought forward for potential adoption in scottsdale unified school district so because i got the the conversation on let's talk i just wanted to make it very clear because what i heard is that parents were talking about it they were upset principals needed to let our parents know i just wanted to state for the record very clearly that the board did not and does not
027meet in secret and we have not taken any action with respect to critical race theory the second topic is summer school because that's where we are at this point in time and again my my report will be brief but we'll have a summary reported as we return in august but we have more than a thousand students attending programs in person so district sponsored programs through summer boost we have our building specific programs i know some of you have had an opportunity to visit some of those we have our high school students many of whom are meeting here at coronado for their programming and then we have another 1428 that are enrolled in online learning opportunities at this point so we have a very robust engagement with our students and it ranges from week-long camps to
028specific tutoring with focus on ela and mathematics and i'm looking forward to the final report and update but i think it's something to celebrate as we've been able to engage a fair number of our students after the school year ended and i want to thank all of our staff that are working with our students during summer school because i also recognize that after the year that we just had it was exhausting and grueling and for people to continue providing that educational support for our students is going above and beyond from my perspective and that will lead to the final comment and that is this is the last meeting of the school year for the scottsdale unified school district board of education and the conclusion of my first year here in scottsdale uh and and there
029are a couple of people that i would like to particularly acknowledge and thank this evening i want to start by acknowledging gladys wagner who started on july 1st with me as the assistant to the superintendent and the board of education this was her first year to work in a public school system and uh no one will ever have that kind of experience to deal with the pandemic the angry phone calls the figuring out how to manage all of these meetings and so i just want to say thank you gladys i appreciate that she also conveniently scheduled her birthday on july 1st so i'll always remember when it is because it's the first day of the new fiscal year i also want to then thank the governing board the members of our leadership team our classified
030staff our professional staff everyone who works at scottsdale unified school district take a deep sigh and and and breath it's been a tough year but everyone pulled together in service of our students and i also want to acknowledge because i see a lot of you here i want to acknowledge our parents um because this was not an easy year for parents from how we started in august and all the way through but our community came together and i think we navigated the pandemic as best as could be expected given all the unknowns and uncertainties and so i just want to end the year with an expression of appreciation for our staff and a note that i'm looking forward to seeing all of our scottsdale unified staff on july 28th for our back to school rally
031under one roof where we'll begin to celebrate 125 years of public education in the school district thank you dr menzel the board will now move to agenda item 9 public comments as a reminder each speaker will have three minutes and then your mic will be cut off we do have about 23 public comments so we expect roughly an hour of public comments so to keep it moving we will cut the mics off three minutes to speak and your time will be projected on the board with that said we will move to our first speaker rob vols i've won the lottery good evening dr manzel board president greenberg and the members of the board my name is rob balls and i'm a product of the scottsdale unified schools district having attended hopi ingleside and graduating from
032arcadia i'm the father of andy a special needs education student who started at copper ridge for elementary and middle school and this fall he will be a second year senior at desert mountain high school in the past my wife renee and i have had concerns about the special education program at desert mountain and we've been vocal advocates on behalf of the educational needs of our sons specifically we've we've experienced difficulties with with our special needs son having access to the same programs offered to other students at his school lack of access to existing programs or offering educationally and emotionally appropriate alternatives has been an ongoing problem in 2018 our son had his civil rights violated by a biology teacher and his case manager when they prohibited him from participating in a biology lab the reason
033given that was that my son's vision would make it difficult for him to participate due to the size of the subject neither the teacher nor the case manager were trained in ophthalmology and had no professional credentials to judge my son's vision instead of adapting the lesson to account for his vision he was placed in a study hall and that day's lesson was not taught to him to this day the school district has never fully addressed the situation we requested in writing no one apologized and i'm sadness to say they would only respond if we thought we needed to bring a lawsuit a year later when andy was successfully completed japanese one we wanted him to move on to japanese too we were told no the teacher thought it would be too difficult to adapt the
034curriculum to his vision when we wanted him to attend summer school again we were told no we were told the susd did not have support services for our son to attend in person my son has an interest in criminal justice but when we were told that the evit program excuse me we were told the program at eve it would not be in his future no one from susd even ever called evit to see if the programs would be adapted for my son's interest lack of equality inclusion for special education students is a very real problem in our district and as a parent with special needs student it has been frustrating and hearing and hearing parents mythical curriculum issues that do not exist when we have students facing real problems that must be addressed i would
035encourage our community to focus on how we can better the district for all students we need more voices for focusing on the needs of our children who have ieps and 504s thank you our next speaker will be kate taylor good evening my name is kate taylor and i'm a former susd parent who has two children who went through cochise elementary school kokopah middle school and graduate from chaparral high school as a member of the class of 2019 and just this may my son ryan graduated as the student body president of the class of 2021 at chaparral you might recall that ryan was also recognized here at the beginning of this past school year with a slideshow presentation by dennis raylor for ryan's eagle scout project where he built a wheelchair ramp for the cafeteria at
036chaparral ryan received his full eagle rank this past march prior to graduation i wanted to speak to two topics with the remainder of my three minutes first and foremost i wanted to formally complement and thank the district for providing a wonderful education for both of my children my husband and i are firm believers in public education we volunteer our time and donate our money to support that belief and our kids are wonderful reflections of the many many things that susd is doing amazingly grace is a rising junior at the university of north carolina chapel hill as a u.s history major with double minors in health and society and chemistry and is on a pre-med track while at chaparral she achieved a 4.9 gpa and was awarded most respectful by the faculty and administration ryan in
037addition to being student body president and an eagle scout will be attending the university of missouri's prestigious school of journalism on a mark twain scholarship mizzou's highest merit-based academic award secondly i wanted to reflect my admiration and appreciation for your willingness to offer covet vaccine clinics at susd school sites especially while schools are essentially empty all summer i know there are many science rejecting anti-intellectuals who are up in arms about this discussion but i hope you will continue to proceed by sorting through the noise of those who yell the loudest and instead follow those who speak the smartest i and many parents recognize that this is not about forcing kids to get a shot without parental consent before they go to art class as some off-the-wall facebook posts would have one believe rational thinking susd
038parents recognize that it is utter hogwash for the naysayers to insist that vaccines can only be administered in an appropriate medical facility the parking lot of state farm stadium was certainly not a medical facility but it was recognized around the state the nation and even much of the entire world as a successful model of vaccine delivery so i'm sure that a clean air-conditioned schoolhouse is quite suitable of a location most importantly and in closing please know that there are hundreds of susd families who applaud the real motivations of this initiative access we recognize that susd is an active member of our community at large not all low-income families have the ability to drive a car that they don't own to a vaccine clinic far from their home providing a local location that one can choose
039to walk to is all about enhancing access for those who face thank you our next speaker will be jan vocal [Music] good evening there's a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric about critical race theory being used as a framework in our schools it has basically become an umbrella under which anything that addresses race or the legacy of racism falls sadly i see people leading this effort who went to school with my kids at kokopan shop their kids sat in honors and ap classes with my kids they know our kids were not indoctrinated or exposed to propaganda in our kids teachers were professionals who did their best to deliver a quality education even when they sometimes fell short when i asked my kids if they felt their teachers promoted some sort of agenda they agreed that any instance
040of something controversial being introduced can lead to charges that teachers are indoctrinating students but as an overall educational experience that is not what went on they said that if the same parents are really concerned about people being treated equally they should be pushing for a fuller and more truthful history curriculum they want kids to read books they should want kids to read books by black authors white authors indigenous authors etc and hear stories that reflect themselves they should want lgbt plus kids disabled kids and all kids to see themselves in all aspects of education and academically rigorous education doesn't just mean the classics in fact i would submit that a more rigorous education means one is exposed to and has to critically evaluate material from a diverse group of people we can't simply say the
041western canon is the be at end all when we know too many voices are missing too many outstanding writers are omitted and the goal should not be i don't see color the goal should be i see your color and i will treat you the same as everyone else but if we are honest that is often not what happens several white people who learn both my kids are attending colleges on scholarships asked me what sports they played two black kids on academic scholarships was not what came to mind as i found out when i asked them why they would say that they saw color so why can't we just be honest about that in order to move past the stereotypes susd kids circulating disgusting and harmful means about depicting george floyd's death and yet parents don't
042want discussions of current events in our classes because they feel it's what social justice activism current events aren't educational students can't sharpen their critical thinking skills by analyzing and discussing current events i simply don't understand when i was in school we studied current events each week to ensure that we could tie what we were learning historically to what was happening at the time it was imperative that we could connect the dots demonstrate that we had foundational knowledge that provided a lens through which we could view the world and understand the world around us we must continue to encourage kids to connect the dots how can students understand what's happening today when they don't know our past many of you just recently learned about juneteenth black wall street the tulsa race massacre and yet you say
043you learned about our history clearly you did not but your kids should they should learn what redlining is in the devastating and lasting impact it had on blacks they should understand that we do have systemic racism in our criminal justice system for example the data is out there if people are willing to seek out the truth so i will end by saying we must provide a robust inclusive education designed to educate designed to develop empathy [Music] [Applause] our next speaker will be hector escarcega hello thank you for having me long time uh listener first time speaker for everybody um hello my name is hector scarce ago i had five daughters um growing up but uh four of them have already gone through uh susd i have one of them still going through school um what
044i wanted to talk about is really going to dovetail on what was said and the best way to do this is through an example uh i researched this and i found something on the web and on the web it does the best thing really what i wanted to articulate and what i'm gonna talk about is really a socio-economic uh problem that we have as driving over here we have apartments as well as houses and a lot of people that are affluent i was not that growing up in case you're wondering but what i found on the net was a really good example that articulates this for everybody there's a gentleman with a really diverse group and as i look around i see a pretty diverse group in here and they're young high school college probably
045graduated from college and they're all out and he says i want to go ahead and start a race and he brings out a 100 bill for the kids and with the 100 bill the kids are you get their attention that way and probably people in here as well but he goes before we start the race i want to ask a few questions and these are the questions he asks he winds up saying please take two steps forward on these questions on the starting line if this applies to you are both your parents still married if they are take two steps and by the way this guy's already walked further down everybody's at the starting line and those that are still married take two steps did you grow up with the father figure in the home
046take two steps take two steps if you had access to a private education take two steps if you had access to a tutor that your parents paid for take two steps if you do not have to worry about your cell phone being shut off take two steps forward if you had to help if you didn't have to help mom and dad pay the bills take two steps forward if you didn't have to wonder where your next meal was coming from take two steps forward if you did not have to rely on financial aid or a student loan to get to college okay there's the visual i wanted to paint a visual picture but this video does it quite well the gentleman tells the people up front to looking back needless to say it's heart wretching
047for me because i see you know socioeconomic is just divides across ages and you see people back there what he wanted to let people know is again you have to be cognizant of the fact of your privilege right those in the back didn't have a chance to win the hundred dollars and he winds up preceding the race in the video and of course the ones up close are the ones that won but being thank you [Music] our next speaker is katrina casey good evening dr menzel and members of the board i'm a parent of two current susd students a high school student at saguaro and a second grade student with autism in an sea classroom at cochise i just wanted to thank the board for prioritizing sped kids for return to school earlier in the
048year it's been hard for all our kids but our sped kids had it particularly hard removed not only from their classrooms but from their therapies too not all sped kids were as lucky as mine having private therapies outside school our teachers and therapists did an amazing job trying to interact with their kids online but much of what they do cannot be transferred to a virtual environment i would also like to thank our amazing teachers paras and aides they went above and beyond this year to make sure that everything felt as normal as possible they made this year feel like a year to remember for the right reasons not the wrong ones they were creative in teaching kids about masks and social distancing they made themselves ready available to help parents with ideas to make life
049easier to reduce stress and feelings of isolation it went so much further than teaching we have some very special teachers for our special kids i know our state has cut our sped budget and i hope susd can find some creative ways to overcome this thank you our next speaker is brad dool hello i uh bring you a message of thanks thank you to the governing board dr menzel your supporting staff thank you for following the science-based direction for clovit19 coming from the maricopa county department of public health arizona department of health services as well as the center for disease control through susd's institution of mitigation practices the tracking and sharing of metrics and having a responsive and effective incident command team suscd not only met but exceeded so many families needs and expectations during the
050kobit 19 pandemic but my thanks doesn't stop there thank you to all of our administrators and educators that helped us through all these trying times those that juggled between online and in-person instruction and attended to our children's and families needs as well as their own thank you to those specialty positions like speech pathologists special education gifted educators nurses pe and early childhood instructors and librarians to all those in support positions food services those who passed out meals the bus drivers janitorial staff and those in information technology that responded in short order with devices and wireless access points for every child in the district if i left anyone out i'm truly sorry just know that i see you the community sees you that we are thankful for you and we are here as the majority to
051support you thank you thank you our next speaker will be jennifer flory all right good evening uh board president uh greenberg vice president sinowski board members dr menzel and the amazing gladys my name is jennifer flory i have two kids in susd an incoming kindergartner or incoming first grader and an incoming fifth grader uh what a year it was just an incredible incredible year so today i am here to give thanks and appreciation to susd um thank you dr menzel for an amazing amazing incredible leadership so impressed by your ability to listen to the various stakeholders uh process large amounts of information reference board policy articulate your thoughts and um your analysis is truly truly amazing i really really appreciate you and um i really like how you uh seek various experts in the field
052like dr sunshine and the director of honor health to help provide input into the situation of this year i also very much appreciate and we as a community appreciate your ability to involve stakeholders and using your the surveys the thought exchange um the different committees the strategic planning committee and that stakeholder engagement is very very appreciative very very much appreciative thank you board members i commend you for a crazy year you did an amazing job and i just i want to appreciate you on behalf of the community as volunteers in this position it's a thankless job but thank you thank you thank you you guys are all so incredible i really appreciate your thoughtful questions your discussions and just uh your your ability to to think through these these very tough and challenging and constantly
053changing guidance of this year so thank you um i was honored to be part of the strategic planning committee which you will hear tonight and i am very impressed with all the stakeholders that were involved in that and wow we've got some amazing smart smart smart smart people at susc just incredible voices and i i am blown away blown away by everybody that was involved in that process so in closing with the leadership of dr menzel the dedication of the board and the continued engagement of our stakeholders i see many amazing things happening for our students and all of which will benefit their future and i appreciate you and thank you everybody and a special shout out to patty with nutrition services because holy moly feeding our kids all summer and all during covig um
054thank you thank you our next speaker will be emmy cardella good evening president greenberg members of the board dr menzel and miss wagner my name is emmy cardella i'm a parent of three in the school district and i'm speaking tonight as president of scottsdale parent council in order to thank dr menzel for his support of our organization this year and just to make a shameless plug for our organization as well so thank you dr menzel's engaged with us all year long he's attended our meetings and in general he has always been willing to listen to the parent voice and has been very vocal that he thinks he values that and encourages it scottsdale parent council is a organization that is for all parents and stakeholders without throughout susd we have monthly meetings throughout the school
055year i hope that every parent attends at least one of our meetings dr menzel is there to do a brief question and answer with parents and then we have a featured speaker who's often someone from the district to or the cabinet to talk about programs and services offered in our district so it's a way to educate parents about what's available to them as well as them to ask questions so i hope that everyone comes and sees us thank you our next speaker will be amy carney hello board administrators i am amy carney i'm a mother of six students who've been educated in scottsdale unified school district for many reasons parents have rightfully questioned your decision to recently adopt this million-dollar sabbath ela curriculum for 9th to 12th graders despite what you're telling us it's very
056easy to see what the publisher of this new curriculum stands for anyone can go to their social media read their blog posts or check out their collaborations and partnerships and see for themselves you mustn't wonder why parents are concerned or considering leaving the district even because of this what you say does not match what we see we hear you say that susd is not implementing critical race theory or divisive ideologies in our schools but we would love to believe you but how can we when the author of our new curriculum promotes activists on sava's social channels not to mention one of savas's advisory board members is the original author on culturally responsive education and currently writes about critical race theory yet you say there'll be no crt in s-u-s-u-s-d using this curriculum go on listenwise.com
057which teachers may use as part of the status curriculum and just see what the first pop-up says when you go onto their website pay attention listen-wise will be used to help our children develop their media literacy skills to spot facts and fakes when it comes to current events i highly recommend all of you check this out in some of your own social media profiles you promote a commitment to social justice and cultural issues rather than what you're going to do to elevate our students math scores or how you plan to counteract the continuous declining enrollment in susd but we're supposed to trust and believe you when you say not in our district we're not implementing crt and that susd is inclusive of all people does this ring true for families of faith or those who
058hold traditional family values a great way for us to learn about what susd truly values is to tell us what our teachers will be trained in this summer and throughout the upcoming school year this will give us great insight into what you truly value we want to know what professional development you governing board members and administrators are choosing to spend your time and our money on what exactly were our teachers and staffing trained on every wednesday while our students were being sent home early each week we want our teachers getting the education and training and real issues that are affecting all students learning perhaps eab the company you've hired to survey your community can ask students teachers and parents about the cheating epidemic that is rampant in your high schools and maybe even middle schools
059this is a huge problem thanks to technology and it's undermining our students motivation to learn and making it very difficult for teachers as well will you make the right decision so that all families living in this district can confidently send their kids to an susd school or will your enrollment numbers continue to decline because of your inaction and refusal to listen to real concerns of parents and other community members at a time when the health of our district is at stake we need to be unified in supporting the education of our students rather than fueling a proxy battle in the war on racism through the implementation of a curriculum that's created by those who care more about political and social activism than the strength of quality public education [Music] [Applause] thank you our next speaker
060will be caroline ho hi my name is caroline ho and today i exercise my right as a good parent and dedicated parent of three students and ask you to rescind your vote and reverse your decision to fund service curriculum my husband and his family are refugees from vietnam and suffered under the brutal communist viet cong while many of their family lost their lives in defense of freedom long before the war the communists of that era moved their marxist ideology into local communities and schools by using critical theory to divide people into class the oppressed and non-oppressed they occur encouraged them to engage in conflict and revolution as a way to right the wrongs for all oppressed people they used two classes of people against each other it was felt as students it turned against teachers
061and and they were taught to be politically correct and denounce their heritage they went as far as to encourage students to report on each other after listening to your online teaching this current school year in our high schools in subjects like language history english and with a non-transparent adoption of your service curriculum i'm deeply concerned and you might ask why the language and ideology and the cultural segregation is the same as the marxist practices of those in those communist countries and you are allowing it to be taught and adopted into our schools instead of class race is being used to divide people let it be known that our goal here today is to convey the message that we welcome diversity without division to unite and improve our future that we will share and let go
062of the quarreling all are created equal and of infinite worth regardless of race class gender sexual orientation identity weight religion or any classification and while they are differences we have more in common because we are part of the whole human family we desire diversity inclusion for our students to learn about other cultures my own family is multicultural and we love it no one believes a group should suffer oppression or discrimination or harassment in any form of bullying we want our kids to be safe in schools we want our students to learn positive inclusive and the safe environment but the savis curriculum does not and is not the right conduit method among many other reasons savis and all of the things adopted continue to impose a system of racism thank you [Applause] thank you our next
063speaker is trish olsen [Music] hello i actually would like to defer my time to carrie kirshner as she has to leave immediately am i allowed to do that did carrie kirk smarter submit a idea yes she did then carrie kirksmart can speak and you can speak later [Music] after many requests i was finally given the sabbath supplemental materials only six days ago the documents i received i've only been to been able to preliminarily review and what i have found is disturbing and disgusting and should not be part of any curriculum savvis promotes mental physical and sexual abuse underage of underage use of drugs and alcohol and so much more at this point i've only had the opportunity to review about 20 pages of the supplemental materials and let me tell you what i found the
064perks of being a wallflower is about a young child who is sexually abused by his alcoholic aunt the boy was has lots of sex throughout the book eats weed brownies and ultimately comes to the realization that his aunt molested him because she too was sexually molested as a child which is why then she commits suicide two male football players kiss and have descriptive gay sex multiple times throughout this supplemental material during one of their sexual encounters one boy's father walks in on them having gay sex and beats his son terribly there is also pedophilia throughout the book including how one young child's first kiss was upsetting to her because it was by her father's boss the book also includes bullying of gay boys this is not literature this should not be presented to our children
065another this was only on page four of the supplemental materials by the way another savas supplement is looking for alaska this book gained notoriety for being the fourth most banned book in the united states due to its profanity and sexually explicit content is a book that teaches how to give a blow job has extensive and descriptive promiscuous teen sex descriptive porn videos watched by teens during the book with extreme narratives masturbation drugs profanity underage excessive drinking drinking and driving the main character even commits suicide by getting so drunk and driving that she because she can't handle life anymore and also they hire stripper to come to class and perform the page 62 describes the main character having sex with a man that is quote hung like a horse and a beautiful sensual lover unquote three
066pages are used to explain how to give a in the end the teens are immune to any decency or innocence and are depicted laying in bed naked after being drunk having sex and smoking a joint this is porn not literature this book also claims that marijuana is better than smoking cigarettes there's no place for our school in for these supplements in our school the liars club again on page four by mary carr this is a book about abusive and alcoholic parents an eight-year-old girl is raped by a teenager and the later sexually abused by her babysitter there's excessive profane language child porn child abuse alcoholism mentality [Music] is thank you [Applause] our next speaker will be trish olsen are you ready to speak i am good thank you oh okay our next speaker will be
067becky williams good evening dr menzel president greenberg vice president zanowski members of the governing board and miss wagner i'm becky williams a parent of two students in the saguaro learning community i also happen to be a teacher in the district i would like to take this opportunity to express my support and appreciation for what this district has accomplished this past year we came together to work and plan as a team with the new superintendent new board members and the unknown of navigating a global pandemic while still educating our students and keeping everyone healthy it was a challenging year for all i don't envy the decisions that you as the governing body had to make weighing impossible what-ifs and uncertainties plans were made and changed health guidance evolved uncertainty overwhelmed at times all the while the
068district remained transparent in its commitment to take care of our students i'm not saying that this past year is anything that we are hoping to recreate anytime soon or that there aren't resulting opportunities for growth but because of what we've gone through together we are ready to move forward stronger and better all the while focused on serving our students i for one am extremely proud to continue as a parent of students and a staff member in susd words cannot express my gratitude for the good that has been done this year but please accept my most heartfelt thank you our next speaker will be uh karine werner apologize i can't read the hi oh karen i apologize hi everyone my name is karen warner and i'm a parent of an susd student and two graduates you
069know a governing board and the administration should work in harmony with parents in the best interest of our children and our students so you just heard some pretty pretty significant uh vile and inappropriate stuff that was found in the ela supplements for ninth grade none of that belongs in our schools and um it seems it seems that you um you're not really working in harmony with parents when you adopted this character curriculum by a unanimous vote so you may say that we won't use those books or websites the truth is ultimately when you adopt the curriculum you get all of it and as you have stated yourselves any board can come in and change or undo what you have done and voted upon and you don't necessarily want to draw attention to that however at
070the end of the day you can say you're not going to adopt certain books but somebody else will come in and do it and it's going to be really hard to not have people be able to have access to the links and the books that you just heard very descriptive descriptions of so are you really okay with children being exposed to this and this content and then validated by their students in a school you have a handout you have the books and you have the excerpts i urge you to read them and then change your mind i'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you did not know that this was part of services curriculum and that this is what they encourage and again kerry just got through a few pages there's many many
071more so as a private citizen and a ususd parent i reject the susc funding for salva's curriculum and call for each board member to reverse their unanimous vote to adopt the sabbath curriculum and mind you page two paragraph three on the left side please read it and if anyone else wants it i have more copies thank you our next speaker will be heidi hyant i'll take a copy of that i apologize if i pronounce sign correctly okay apologies thank you heidi wyan yes hi my name is heidi wyatt and i'm here today because my second grader eight years old came home from school and told me about george floyd and how great he is and the protests that are going on in current events she learned this from her library teacher i'm sure that the
072library teacher isn't supposed to be teaching this i'm sure it's not in the wonderful curriculum that doesn't teach crt but that's what she came home to my husband and i specifically want our children to be children at this age i don't want them learning about current events protests racism george floyd blm none of that stuff and i am not opposed to diverse education at all i graduated laude from asu with a women's studies minor and a justice studies major i completely want my kids and all the kids to have a great forum of debate and discussion about all these events and what's going on in the world but i think the young children shouldn't be put into this they should be doing core academics and if you want discussions and if you want debate and
073if you want all those wonderful classes where you talk about the current events then it should be labeled current events it should be labeled justice clash it should be labeled this way instead of completely infiltrating all the school system all the classes how do i know next year the pe teacher isn't going to talk to systemic racism about my nine-year-old kid is she is that what's going to happen is that what the pe teacher is going to talk about how do i know this stuff and i know crt is not in the school but it's up to the teachers the teachers have the choice to put this in and talk about it without you knowing without me knowing and without my kids having the courage and um education background to defend themselves and debate that
074all they do is just take it in and it's wrong thank you our next speaker will be stuart rhoden i feel like the price is right hi um president greenberg dr menzel members of the board audience members tonight i want to spend a few minutes as a famous individual once said uh to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand i want to speak not as a father although the voices of parents are critical to the discussions surrounding public education but as an educator for over 25 years who has taught in a variety of educational arenas in a number of cities and a number of different levels great levels sorry what is interesting is that my two children have grown up with not just two phd parents but two
075phd grandparents i want to put that on the record not because of who i am but to stress my coming here tonight is about significantly more than my kids i want to speak tonight on behalf of our kids for some and i guess i got to use these for some including those who have never set foot in a board meeting they're here because of his desire for their kids to be spared what they think is an educational atrocity that somehow their kids will receive a less than rigorous education if they learn the history of humankind that is inclusive and authentic for all somehow it has become the norm for some to be more concerned with appearance and tradition than knowledge fear instead of facts i want to focus on a theory that is actually taught
076in public schools by many and for decades john dewey professed that public education is the most effective in educating the whole child when young people combine their lived experiences with classroom experiences in short learning by doing research shows that when people when people learn about diverse cultures they learn more about themselves as well dubois spoke of a double consciousness as it pertains to race many public educators education critics who misinterpret the work of dewey and inclusiveness and their argument there with race race is but one identity marker of who we are we are all age race gender disability social class religion height educational level and on and on and on as we heard in the other speaker kimberly crankshaw famously coined this phenomena as intersectionality this intersectionality makes us who we are and we are
077all different what i would humbly suggest is an examination not into theories that are not being taught anywhere in our district but rather a review of the ones that are what are we teaching our children we have not just textbooks but books in the library and on summer reading lists that do not represent students lived experiences what are we teaching our children when we deny them the opportunity to celebrate month-long celebrations of their culture and heritage what are we teaching our children when some adults want them to learn what we learn the way we learned it instead of wanting better for our kids it is extremely easy to be critical it takes a lot to be a critical thinker humbly effectively teaching young people how to become their authentic selves is and should be an
078essential element of public education rigorous relevance are meaningless if we do not focus our educational efforts on the whole child [Music] thank you [Applause] our next speaker will be amanda ray good evening first i want to start out and thank mrs stombres principal at cheyenne i have two cheyenne children at um they were in second fourth grade and mrs dombrece took more than one of my tearful phone calls in august when my second grader thought her brain didn't work because her chromebook actually didn't work and i would say oh is lacks as well these ladies are amazing my second grader had mrs knowlton and my fourth grader had mrs hayquist and they were amazing teachers they had an incredible experience and my husband and i on a weekly basis thank god for the blessing that
079cheyenne has been for our family and the blessing of kovid has been that that's not the experience of every student or family in our district and i would say that cheyenne is the shining example but i lived in a bubble and didn't realize the lack of transparency within the district and the accountability and lack of standards from the district particularly in the in the older older grades my kids are still young and again i'm in a bubble of cheyenne but i had a teacher reach out to me recently she walked into the classroom in october to accept a long-term subposition she had no lesson plan no curriculum guide she asked her department for help and they gave her none she resorted to googling what do students learn in blank grade in the blank subject and
080i'm leaving that out because i don't want to give a hint to who she is without her consent what she told me that was that teachers teach and assess whatever they want it's the wild wild west at her school and you have to hope that your child gets a passionate teacher there was no communication from the administration no expectation to offer asynchronous learning last year the only teachers offering offering it were those that heard or heard it mentioned during the board meetings there was no professional development on wednesdays the parking lots were empty by noon and it's funny because we were told that this was so badly needed and i actually would have respected more of saying our teachers need a break because they're teaching two classes but to sell it as under the guise
081of professional development was unfortunate school board meetings have have become or maybe they were before when i wasn't attending our smoke and mirrors we see fancy presentations and it make like makes it sound like the district has its act together but it's not translating into our campuses or into the classrooms as a parent i would expect that my students assignments and core curriculum curriculum would be roughly the same as another student at a different campus and we wouldn't be subject to the luck of the draw it seems like this would be more efficient and a better way to make sure that all students are given the education they deserve it should come as no surprise that students are leaving the public school system due in part to the lack of academic river excuse me academic
082rig thank you our next speaker will be nikki torito good evening thank you president greenberg vice president zanowski members of the governing board superintendent menzel and gladys thank you for allowing me to speak this evening i'm nikki torito a proud parent of two amazing children who attend susd schools i'd like to begin by saying thank you to all the administration teachers and staff of scottsdale unified school district who are working so hard this year for putting together a plan during this absolutely unprecedented year that kept us safe and healthy and kept our students continuing on the path of lifelong learning and individual educational success that this district values i appreciate all the time and effort that went into helping our children succeed both academically and emotionally during what was a very difficult school year this
083year's success does not surprise me though it just further shows me why my husband and i chose susd for our children we chose susd and specifically the saguaro learning community complex for our children because we value the diversity on campus and various programs the schools in this complex have to offer our children we sought out and chose the spanish dli program for both our children the cultural diversity and opportunities in this program reflect the academic and personal goals that we value for our family our daughter as a rising junior has already received her seal of by literacy being fluent in both english and spanish and our son going into sixth grade as well on his is well on his way too the tli program is not only academically strong but provides my husband and i
084the opportunity to give the gift of bi-literacy something that we have not sadly ever achieved to our children this capability provided by susd and its amazing administrators and teachers will take our children into their future and provide them life and career possibilities in a world where 7.6 percent of the world population speak spanish and where spanish is the third most used language on the internet the diverse experiences that my children have had the opportunity to experience in susd have given them an amazing range of knowledge and insight change and progress are inevitable even though humanity always resists change and my husband and i believe that susd has given our children the ability to become the change that they and our next generation want to see in the world thank you so much for your time
085thank you our next speaker is alison siegel oh stuck to the chair it's that time of year hi my name is alison siegel thank you for allowing me to speak um i first because nobody has said this yet because i hear crt being mentioned a lot i just want to say that crt is not a curriculum it is not something that's used in k-12 education it was never designed to be used in k-12 education it is a legal framework it is not a required class even in college and it's a way of looking at the law that incorporates race so that's the first thing i want to say because i'm not worried about crt in k-12 education what i am worried about is i'm worried about developmentally appropriate education for kids and i don't hear
086a lot of conversation about that and i think it's because a lot of people don't know what that looks like i'm a teacher i taught during a time where i was able to provide that and i see very clearly that my children are not getting that and part of that is because of testing testing is a creativity killer and anyone who is looking at test scores at a school to determine whether or not that school is worth your child's attendance is looking at the exact wrong thing and the way that i know this is because my children attended arcadia neighborhood learning center which was a wonderful vibrant creative education space for children and it was misunderstood largely by most of the other people in the susd community and it was killed and no longer exists
087and it was a shame because that was an open campus if you can imagine such a thing when i took my children there and they were we were allowed to go and see what was happening in the classrooms and even to participate and the amount of learning that happened there was amazing and i remember my child's kindergarten teacher mr welch who'd been teaching forever having carpet times where he would call children to the carpet and they would raise their hands eagerly and say mr welch i have a connection i have a connection that's critical thinking that's what it looks like and instead of doing that very like visceral lovely kind of education schools public schools in particular are being forced to provide some kind of canned curriculum i know that they're doing the best that
088they can i don't understand why teachers continue to do it frankly i couldn't kudos to you but i really think that the crux of this issue as to how our children are learning and what they're able to get in their classrooms is a legislative issue and if people want to see changes in our schools in the state of arizona then they must respond legislatively and they must stop voting for the people who continually deride education [Applause] thank you our next speaker will be kevin maxwell sorry i was muted hi my name is kevin maxwell i'm a community member and just a strong supporter of susd i believe that a strong community starts with a sound education of all the community members so that's why i'm here tonight i'm also a member of the sust foundation
089and i just want to say wow what a year you guys had right very very difficult year lots of difficult decisions but one thing i noticed as a casual observer is it seems like every single time you made a difficult decision where probably 50 percent of your stakeholders were opposed to what you decided on you always did it for the best interest of the students it seemed like you always did the best into the students so i want to congratulate you on that and i'm looking forward to another great year since i'm on the foundation board and i have a couple seconds here left let me go ahead and tell you about some of the exciting things i think that we're excited about for funding uh we'll continue right now we're going to do a
090new partnership with scottsdale community partners on their big kickoff event next week next month i know it's a big huge event it's been going for many years i know the foundation is very proud to be a partner participating in that this year we're also continuing to partner with the citrus and stem program giving women an opportunity to know that development and career and technology is available to them so we think that's a wonderful program also we also are helping to provide scholarships for camp innovation this year which will happen at tonalia tavon kiva and lagoon i believe so those were out looking for some uh the opportunity to provide some great scholarships and some students who are very very deserving and then lastly we're looking forward to participating in the big kickoff event that the
091district's having um so lots of good things going with the foundation and we're looking forward to a great partnership and congratulations on a great year i'm looking forward to another good one thank you thank you our next speaker will be eric kirland thank you volunteers of the governing board dr menzel uh i want to thank all the speakers too because i think everybody spoke with passion but have kept it under control and i think i've learned a little bit about where other people are coming from and i know that they just love and care about their kids and i think we can all kind of pick up on that and then there's another theme that's coming out and it's community and those are the voices we need to hear back in the late 90s i
092was teaching at ho com and we had some capital dollars and so we had a faculty meeting and our principal mr flynn came in and he says hey we got this money what should we do with it and at the time we were getting a lot of graffiti and so everybody was saying we should build a fence so people aren't able to put graffiti on the walls my first thing is i wanted my own private bathroom but that didn't go the second thing i wanted was a gymnasium my idea was if you bring the community in they will be the peacekeepers of the building no one's going to mess with their building you can rent it out well i was wrong we went with the fence and you know things have changed and we have
093some crazy things out there so the fence is good but we do need to continue with building community and that's where i come to you today in the south of scottsdale i've talked to you about this dr menzel we have such a great opportunity to create a community school and i want to talk just a little bit about how we can continue our i mean with the pandemic we've had these great partnerships started that we can now continue the door is open we can build from the bottom and we can build what we want so we have a partnership with honor health and a partnership with the city of scottsdale and we have parenting classes we have ged classes in the evening language classes and we give high quality child care from a very early
094age based on sliding scale as to what people make we have it in the south part of our district where transportation isn't provided those parents love their kids but they are working so hard to provide for maslow's hierarchy of needs food shelter that everything becomes this great stressor so while coronado has this wonderful program we have to start with those kids before they get to school and this is an opportunity here in arizona one of the great things we have is school choice we pretty much lead the nation we're number one in school choice we have to give a better choice down here to bring in people from other districts it's a doggy dog world out there and we're wearing milk bone underwear we just saw the budget today so we have to do better
095and for people that you know i was on this this committee with dr kam for people that do not believe in the function and and and the values of this district good luck there are plenty of other choices there and i hope they find what they're looking for because their kids deserve it but we have to provide one for the kids that really don't have those parents to take them to other places i think that's an opportunity so i'm happy to work on that with you volunteer i'd like to welcome back dr dodds [Music] thank you our final speaker of the evening will be jennifer mcdowell i'm reading since i tend to curse okay um when i look back at my youth and memories of school i'm hard pressed to recall almost anything it's like
096no one ever even tried teaching me math but i do remember with perfect clarity some of those educators with whom i made a connection i recall sparring with dr rand in constitutional law i remember being dismissed from mr gould's ap lit class for stating that dickens was overrated and my theology teacher father smith referred to me for four years as the patron saint of underachievers overall i was a terrible student i was lazy i wasn't engaged i didn't turn in my work but when a teacher would solicit my opinion on some subject or flat out argue with me that human connection and that feeling that someone cared about what i had to say that is what would motivate me i'd put a little more effort into the next paper or search case law for the
097next battle with dr rand to show up father smith i arrived one school year over the summer i consumed the entire religious catalogue of two authors those personal relationships that students make with staff and teachers often evolve out of conflict and debate and discussion and open dialogue sometimes around difficult subjects sometimes current events those are the educators that i remember and those are the very teachers that my children have loved the most not coincidentally i have noticed that those are the teachers that tend to be the most requested at our schools i've had a lot to be concerned about over the last 15 years raising two children in public schools we've had abysmal funding that's left our schools understaffed our teachers underpaid our students unsupported but what really frightens me are the few voices calling
098for the end of meaningful dialogue and robust debate in our classrooms before the community allows a hostile state legislature that won't fund us to also censor difficult conversations i hope that supporters of creating lifelong learners and critical thinkers will speak out i hope our district will support our teachers and let them be the true educators that they are thank you [Music] thank you and i apologize i missed a card our final speaker will actually be janet larkin thank you i actually think it's better that i am last i'm janet larkin i'm a retired school teacher from the scottsdale school district through my three children went through the schools here and they're all there my six grandchildren are all in public schools as well i'm here as a representative of aauw which is american association of
099university women and in light of the things that were going on at different board meetings a group put together a resolution that they want everyone to hear the community the board dr menzel aauw of arizona whereas school district board meetings throughout arizona are being beset by disruptive agitators whereas around the state groups and individuals who are neither district residents nor parents of district students are converging on school board meetings to cause havoc and divert divert open and honest communication of school issues whereas social media has been used by said disruptive groups and individuals to urge attendance and disturbances at local school board meetings whereas school personnel and governing boards as well as other elected officials and their families are being threatened and are needing security protection whereas the disruption of school board meetings hijacks productive
100discussion of issues independent of the facts whereas the disruption of school board meetings undermines our democratic processes and the open honest peaceful equitable and civil dialogue of issues by district personnel students parents and residents whereas the education of arizona youth is a nonpartisan state obligation spelled out in the arizona constitution and whereas the american association of university women supports a strong system of public education that promotes gender fairness equity diversity and inclusivity therefore be a result the members of aauw arizona do issue a call for action and condemn number one condemn the disruption of the school board meetings call for the investigation exposure of the groups and individuals responsible for creating school district board meeting disruption urge accountability by all citizens in protecting productive and civil discussion and participation by district personnel students parents and
101residents seek immediate thank you and i apologize again for missing your card this concludes our public comments section for the evening the board will now move to agenda item 10a information discussion item strategic planning update dr menzel thank you president greenberg and members of the governing board i'd like to introduce dr connie cam as many of you know we selected cam solutions to facilitate our strategic planning process and we're wrapping up phase one and she has a presentation and i'm gonna just turn it over to you and thank you for all the work you've done with our team great thank you it's been such a privilege governing board dr menzel thank you for having me tonight and also thank you for selecting us to facilitate the strategic plan many of the members of our design
102team are in this room right now and i want to echo what was said before they're brilliant and i think you'll be very pleased to see where we are in this process and to learn a little bit more about where we're going now i'm not sure how to further my slide so jonathan what do i do this [Music] the keyboard is under here okay and here we go let's see if this works okay i'm a mac user oh i like this better i get clickers all right so the presentation will be within our time zone not three minutes a little bit longer but i do want you to see what we will be discussing in the next 15 minutes or so um first of all i want to spend a little bit of time talking
103about the context of all of our work our big conversation to begin with was what does it mean to prepare future ready students i'd like to also share with you how the design team was selected and how we've involved other stakeholders with input and then our current progress what we have accomplished so far we've only accomplished phase one which is to to develop the vision the mission and the values and i will give you a preview to our next steps really operationalizing the words this is a three-phase strategic planning process all right so the context goes back to the 1700s recognizing that we have had disruptive innovations in our nation's history starting right around the time we declared ourselves as an independent nation with steam mechanical power production equipment any time any time electronics or
104technology replaces muscle power or human power it's part of what the world economic forum did scott this discusses as the industrial revolution so phase one steam phase two division of labor electricity mass production which is when our current educational system was founded in the late 1800s and it's still the system that we follow today it's a factory model it's a functional model in 1969 electronics hit the scene about 80 hundred years about 80 to 100 years later you'll see all these disruptive innovations and now we've moved into the cyber physical systems that integration of computation networking and physical processes our disruptive innovations are no longer 80 to 100 years apart they're about every 12 months or faster and with covid even exacerbated much more quickly so with that said here is a little slide about
105the cyber physical systems we have to recognize we're educating kids for a very different world than the world in which we grew up but if you get into many classrooms across the country and i haven't actually had the privilege to work with educational systems throughout the world you'll see something very similar to what most of us experienced even the youngest amongst us i'm going to show you a very quick video just as a placeholder do know that the members of the design team had a great deal of reading to do we're studying a book together we've read multiple articles and we've watched many many videos and i'm just going to use this as a placeholder for the future of work will our children be ready okay so now do i click something no there we
106go [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so those robot dogs were actually patrolling parks in asia telling people to put their masks on which i thought was curious so everything you saw in that video i'm so used to presenting tonight around sorry i think i'm supposed to be facing this direction so everything that you saw in that video is actually happening right now now john dewey was mentioned earlier he made this statement a long time ago you'll look to see his dates that if we teach today as we taught yesterday we rob our children of tomorrow and i want to spend a little tiny bit more time talking about the context that brought us all together for this new strategic plan there's a great deal of writing and thinking across the world on
107something called transversal competencies for years we've talked about helping kids to develop 21st century skills it's a little bit too late since we're a quarter of the way into the 21st century and this caught my attention so my company and i did a lot more reading and research on transversal competencies and i want to give you a visual that might be helpful first of all oh i'm sorry okay sorry so transversal competencies are the abilities mindsets and qualities that students need to develop in addition to meeting the standards in ela math science history and social sciences so when i go through the transversal competencies which i'm going to do very quickly do recognize this is not replacing teaching kids to read write speak listen and compute these competencies are really our methodology the way we
108approach teaching and learning while we teach kids the basic skills and content and concepts in standards all right so here is a visual that might be helpful if you think of a transversal as a line that intersects at a diagonal two planes two lines let's say one of those horizontal lines is a timeline bringing us right to the present and hopefully into the future and another one of those parallel lines would be the disruptive innovations i just mentioned in education today too often we find people teaching at this level mass production and by the way we have some computers let's use those computers as opposed to reaching into the future and anticipating the competencies students will need for the jobs that will be available now we don't know what those jobs are so what are
109those competencies that transcend jobs one area of those transversals would be in thinking dynamically and you heard many people tonight in the open session talk a lot about thinking critically creatively innovatively problem solving how do we teach our kids at that level while we're still teaching them to read write speak and listen how about knowing themselves before their own operating system is taken over by another entity who am i how can i develop that voice of self-efficacy that awareness that initiative that resilience how do we educate kids to develop that self-knowledge caring about others intercultural awareness openness empathy compassion and the fourth area engaging with others how do we help our students to learn the skill of collaboration developing higher levels of emotional intelligence those social skills conflict resolution those are the transversal competencies that
110according to multiple writers across the world are the competencies that will take us into the future regardless of what the jobs are will our students will be prepared in addition we in the design team are reading the book leading high performance school systems and i'm going to let you take a moment to read this statement from mark tucker this is really the theme of the book that the people on the design team are reading take a moment to look at that we need to develop a system that is much better adapted to the challenges that we now face tucker's book focuses on lessons from the world's best so in addition to emphasizing a future future focused approach we're also working to incorporate key lessons from high performing school systems globally as we read this book
111together and this is just one book we're looking at multiple articles and multiple examples listening to many people on this concept of what does it mean to prepare future ready kids so this slide what does it mean to engage students in a world education you're going to hear a little bit more about that in a moment all right so now what process have we followed if this is the context that we're entering strategic planning if this is the context for our strategic planning work how did we invite stakeholders who's this design team so i want to give you a little background to that too on january 11 i had the opportunity to meet with your cabinet and we opened an application process with a written questionnaire here are some of the questions first of all
112we asked people to commit to the multiple meetings that we have and the reading that we're asking them to do to prepare for our meetings but in addition we asked them why they why they wanted to be a member of the design team concerning the global shifts and covid19 what do they see as strategic opportunities and challenges qualities and practices of a future focused school and district and then lastly as we celebrate diversity and emphasize equity describe a unique perspective you offer to the strategic planning process so multiple people applied and we were able to form a design team were very deliberate about making certain that every region in scottsdale unified school district was represented with administrators teachers parent members parents and community members in addition to two members from our board of education as
113well as your cabinet and district leadership we have now 40 active members and we have been meeting from february 17th through june 16th to develop phase one of the strategic plan which is what you're going to see tonight we've met both virtually and in person for a total of five days multiple zoom sessions that were shorter than a day and then two in-person days we also i we couldn't invite students to be part of this team because we met during school days during school hours so what i did is i reached out to the community scottsdale unified school district community i said okay who do we need to talk with as we're developing a vision as we're developing a mission as we're developing our values how do we bring the student voice in so we've
114had many panels as was mentioned earlier starting with sisters in stem they stepped up first and then we've had representatives from all of your high schools talk to us about the mission they see active in their school and what they'd like us to include as a concept in our mission we also ask students about the values that they saw active in their schools all high schools in scottsdale were represented with some pretty impressive student voices so we were able to bring in the students in that way and will continue to do so we've also invited community input not only through thought exchange but also dr menzel has been out now to every region in scottsdale at the high schools holding town hall meetings and a lot of what he gathered as information will will inform
115our phase two and three of the strategic planning process too we also requested input on a survey district-wide here is a sample of that survey when i asked about this was fascinating when i asked about vision statements out of 1084 people they were divided 542 to 542 i've never seen that before that was fascinating and then when we did the mission it was a little clearer that mission three was to the um preference of a large number of people but we brought all this information including all of the comments back to the design team for their consideration so we've invited a lot of people to be part of this process not just the members on the design team and here's where we are now here's our progress so far i want to give you kind
116of an overview to this process very quickly before i share the vision mission and values with you that have been selected for the the governing board's approval first of all phase one is just about what are your words but these words don't do anything except look nice on a poster on the wall or on a website unless you marry them to strategic goals objectives actions indicators being measurements so we develop a whole architecture under the strategic goals to ensure that we're moving toward that which we said we want to we also do a pretty intense data analysis to see what our data are telling us and then phase three is where it all comes together this is where all those words and the strategic goals are operationalized into district programs and practices so please be
117aware that you're just going to see phase one it is just the tip of the work that needs to be done to truly implement and sustain a strategic planning process all right here is the vision statement that's been suggested to the board a vision statement first of all let me i'm sorry let me give you an overview as to what a vision emission and values are then i'm going to show you the vision statement this was a late edition slide a vision statement provides a very clear concise look at what the organization aspires to be it's always on your banner it's out in front of you for our nation life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that's our mission statement and we have to work really hard to operationalize that to make that truth it's
118a vision statement and we put it out in front of us this is who we are the missions and it's aspirational so pay attention to that word aspire a mission statement says this is the organization's purpose this is what guides our actions this is why we exist to support that vision and then your values are the how of the organization how are members of this organization going to treat one another as well as others outside of the organization so if your vision is what is on your banner and your mission is why do we exist toward that vision as scottsdale unified school district your values are how we plan to work together and treat one another so now here are your vision here is your vision and your mission the vision is engaging all students
119in world class future focused learning now it's up to us as scottsdale unified school district and within the strategic planning process to define exactly what does it mean to be world-class you know if you think about a world-class athlete if you tell me that your son or daughter is world class that says to me he can pizza in the world she competes in the world our intent with world class is that the students who go to this school are equipped for the future we had speakers earlier today thanking the district for setting their kids up for success for for being at chapel hill and all the opportunities that those that child has because of a great education that's our commitment to all children in this district also the mission is we inspire motivate and empower
120all to think critically act collaboratively and embrace diversity for a life of intellectual exploration community engagement and personal growth that's why we exist to inspire motivate and empower our students and our community to think critically act collaboratively and embrace diversity so that we go forward to a life of intellectual exploration community engagement and personal growth and here are the values we talked a lot about the values we did lots of surveys and questionnaires about our values we asked the kids what values would you like to see us adopt in this district so here are the values that we are putting forth to the governing board excellence integrity empathy we have three more go ahead and read those value statements when you as an organization state values that's what you live by that's a commitment that
121you're making and that means in the strategic goals and all the objectives under the strategic goals in operationalizing through your policies and practices and actions you're making a commitment that this is what we stand for here are the next three trust inclusion and unity go ahead and read those value statements they're brilliant all right with those six values with a very strong vision and a very ambitious very strong mission and a very ambitious vision now we go on to the next part of our work and that's phase two that's the foundation now we have to make it happen i'm going to give you a very complex slide i recognize that this is a a graphic that might leave some people behind if i had more time i'm happy to explain it but let me just
122say this i want you to see a picture that we've just done phase one phase two we start as the new school year comes about strategic goals objectives commitments initiatives strategies action plans indicators a timeline a communication program how do we make this happen and what do our goals need to be we take this plan we put into action and at the heart of everything we do and i remind the design team of this every time we're together we're student centered we're student centered students as future ready learners everything that we do and the only reason any of us are in this room is because we share a commitment to students to be being prepared for their future so students as future ready learners and to support that we have to support our classroom teachers
123because in a school district the only relationship that really makes a difference and this is the definition of why we're all here is that relationship between teachers and students and the work that's being done in the classroom supporting that are collaborative educator teams they might be plc's they might be data teams they might be other teams that are formed that are formed around a common or current issue that you need to face supporting collaborative educator teams are school and district department leaders and leadership teams notice everything is going toward a leadership by lifting students as future-ready learners and then we have district leadership the board the superintendents the assistant superintendents how do we support students as future-ready learners by supporting all of these groups that are working for the kids we have to collect evidence
124district-wide evidence measures of our efficacy school district department indicators as well as classroom learning observations this is my dissertation area formative learning it's not just assessment it's a whole dialogue of learning that involves looking at evidence of children's learning in real time we also have to operationalize the plan and this is all part of the strategic planning process it's not just words on a page how do we change the way we think about school improvement district office department improvement we have to be compliant with the state of arizona but what else needs to be added in order to make this three-phase strategic planning framework work teams engaged in a cycle of inquiry are kids learning what do we want kids to know how are we doing what are our next steps growth based evaluation and
125observation systems if we hold people accountable for an old system under a no child left behind mentality we're we're not going to move forward with any of this we have to hold people accountable for and help them and support them it should be a growth system not just i'm going to do a check box but how do you want to grow future focused authentic personalized curriculum everything goes back to curriculum and i know many of you here are concerned about curriculum everything goes back to how we're teaching kids what we're teaching kids authentic meaning real world are we recognizing the needs of each learner our system under the industrial revolution was not geared toward that kind of observation of an asset-based education what do we do to make a change equity diversity inclusive practices as
126a system do we even understand what it means to overcome implicit biases that was talked about and that's my timer for me but nobody else said it so i'm going to keep on going no i'm almost done and inclusive i set mine at 15 minutes inclusive community engagement huge and you have such an active community in scottsdale and you have so many brilliant people i grew up not too far away you have so many brilliant people in this community wow we have to really make us make certain that we're flattening out the walls of the school inviting community in bringing kids out to the real world so that is the whole picture of our strategic planning process so far we're just at the tip of the iceberg and i'm going to close with this quote
127we cannot always build the future for our youth but we can build our youth for the future and that's it [Music] [Applause] we have on our action items uh the approval of the vision mission and value statements but at this time are there any questions or comments for dr kam about the process we've used so far how we reached those vision mission value statements or any other questions you might have about the phases for the strategic plan vice president sanowski dr kam i would just like to thank you for this opportunity for our community to come together and be part of the future for students in scottsdale schools thank you for your hard work up until now and into the future it's been my pleasure totally my pleasure and you're all so awesome it's very
128easy to work with this group so thank you are there any other questions or comments for dr kam at this time well i would just like to echo vice president zanowski's uh comments on this i think it's been a really thorough and thoughtful project it's been difficult because of the virtual learning environment and the virtual working environment i'm glad that we're able to meet in person now i think it's been much more fruitful i don't know if vice president sinowski agrees with that but i i hope she does and i also think it's it's been really great working with such a diverse group i know the board received an email earlier today from a committee member concerned about the input provided and you know my comment to that is it's a committee system i would
129say that 98 of the input i provided might not have been taken up i mean that's just how it is because we worked by getting feedback from the community we did it several times we saw the 50 50 split but we also worked very collaboratively and it's just been a great process and i'm so thankful to all the members from staff to parents to community members who have shown an interest and a willingness to help us out in this process so thank you very much are there any final questions or comments thank you very much dr kam yes thank you for the honor the board will now move to item 11 consent agenda the chair moves to approve the consent agenda as amended all is there a second second vice president zanowski seconds it is
130moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda as amended all those in favor say aye aye aye the motion carries 5-0 without objection i would call for a 10-minute bathroom break scottsdale unified school district number 48 is now resuming the time is 7 18 p.m dr mental would you like to introduce one of the individuals we just hired i would uh this evening you approve the hire of dr kim dodds who's coming back to scottsdale and we just want to send you official welcome we are excited to have her rejoin the scottsdale unified team as our director of teacher and learning welcome thank you very much and welcome the board will now move to consent agenda item 11 l i ready expansion to elementary school vice president zanowski yes we just spent quite a significant
131amount of time discussing our commitment to our students informative learning and meeting our students needs and this is a very large ticket item over 378 thousand dollars of commitment it also is a huge time commitment on behalf of our staff for training for implementation so i really just want us to be able to have a conversation and preparing for this meeting as some of you might know that we have the opportunity to ask a lot of questions or ask questions if we choose to on issues and there were a lot of questions on this particular issue well over a dozen questions and in seeing that i made a commitment to myself as a governing board member to not just let that slide i think it's very very valid point to address questions publicly whether i
132approve of something or not i just feel like this is something that we need to have an open discussion on because it is a big financial commitment and um a few items i would like um address maybe dr guerin maybe you could uh just give an overview and then i'd like the board members to be able to ask questions and it doesn't have to be huge because we did the public's aware that we did approve fastbridge and now we're talking about i ready so if you could maybe go over some of the differences the impact on students potentially student learning and addressing our particular student needs that would be wonderful vice president sunowski be happy to i also have dr hagiat here and i wonder if it would be um great to start off with
133a principal voice on someone that has used ireti and what they're seeing in their building because i think that when you when you really illustrate what's happening in a classroom that brings the program to light so would someone want to volunteer to talk about that alice wants to thank you thank you very much for having us here i was so excited to hear that you wanted to know more about the i ready program three years ago when i came into the district i came from illinois as most of you know and we truly worked very hard on having an assessment system that helped us drive instruction to meet the needs of all our children and when i came in um i looked for that and i couldn't find it so a teacher who taught up
134in washington brought ireti to me and i had sticker shock much like what you all probably have right now and they came to me the following fall i already did and said well we have a pilot program would you be interested in trying it and to hear the teacher say what an impact it had on her teaching made me want to try it for us and now i can't imagine our decision making without it i ready provided two things it provided an assessment a diagnostic and it provided an intervention and the diagnostic helped us really see where the children were in regards to people from or children from all over the country so it was a norm to test we knew and i knew coming in here that our scottsdale students and our school students
135did very well overall but what did that mean and always going back to the question are students learning because of us or in spite of us are they learning just because they have a great background and supportive parents or are they learning because of the impact our teachers had and one thing that we've seen is they are truly learning because of the teachers we have it measures the growth of a student so we can see where they come in in the fall and we can progress monitor them and we can give them benchmark assessments in the winter and in the spring to see if they've reached their target growth or maybe they've even reached their stretch growth i can't tell you the excitement that my teachers had this spring when we looked at our data
136meetings and our grade levels and they saw the growth that their students had they were so proud of their students and proud of themselves that alone was a wonderful discussion and a springboard for next year and everything that they're going to do next year outside of the assessment which gave us that valuable information to form who needed extra support and who didn't we were also able then to see our intervention program so i ready gave our students not only the computer pathway each student gets their my path so which is an individualized program for the students but it also gave the teachers the ability to use that teacher toolbox to decide what other intervention small group instruction can they deliver to their students whether it be small group or whole group what were they having
137difficulties on as a whole and then how could they support that so we had made the commitment that it would be 15 minutes every day for ireti in reading and in math and that individualized instruction that they received whether it be computer-based or student small groups really had an impact on the students and they were so excited the students were when they could see their levels and they could chart their progress and they got their little coins for doing well they were just very excited and seeing the students themselves set goals and where they wanted to be really helped with the engagement of the assessment as well because we know that students if you stick them inside in front of a computer and you say go ahead and do your best on this test and
138then you leave them be all of a sudden they finish the test in three minutes and they said they did their best but this helped really um monitor and give the students a goal and really they became then a little bit more informed of their own learning and felt more empowered with it do you have any more questions no that was helpful thank you board member beckman no i just was going to thank you to you principals foreign for everything your last day or appreciate all you've done and thank you for that kind of assessment it was very helpful to hear from the principals about how they feel something like this is benefiting them at the site are there any other board member questions or comments about the expansion of ireti i do have board
139remember lindsay it's not appearing on my screen i apologize can you speak to the toolbox the way it's charged because i see desert canyon getting 18. licenses but being charged on total enrollment so dr hockey got is our negotiator with with iready so i'm going to turn the mic over to her first of all thank you for having us up here and please uh join me in really appreciating our principals here that are really advocating for others that are wanting um to have i ready and so the pricing i have um ms salinas on the pricing for us from iready as you may need more in depth um so what happens with the toolbox is they do it by the enrollment and so it's based on the school enrollment this is not based on the
140licenses the licenses are for student use for math and for ela and what i ready has done for us is keep that pricing below 60 and so as far as i know none of our schools have gone above that 60. what gets really confusing on the price on the pricing because i was confused is that typically what you and i want to do is add everything together and divide by the number of enrollment and we're not able to do that because the professional development is separate the toolbox is also a separate cost so that we're able to really when when we were doing the negotiations it was more based on that student enrollment piece and how many students if the site license is the one that's desired that cost is less if it's individual license
141such as if you look at your pricing with desert canyon elementary school that has less licenses then that increases the price we also got a break on all of it it was a 50 break because of us doing it in bulk if we remove schools then that 15 can go to 10 or 5 or none and so i've spent probably the last three or four days just looking at pricing but if we have other specific questions do we have miscellaneous up in the cloud somewhere yes i am here thank you and she's our i ready representative i'd love to call on you but i don't board member uh vice president sanowski then board member hart wells so question on the pricing can we add additional student licenses after we have if a site chooses because
142i noticed one site had like 19 requested yet they were charged for the toolbox for their campus enrollment can they then later choose to add more student licenses yes as long as you authorize that expense for us we certainly can always expand to more interest you know we had some other inquiries but we wanted to make sure that we brought to you what's currently solid commitment from our sites from our principals and our teachers our principals have been working with our teachers closely and so others that start to see benefit because this is something that is really catching on we will not say no if you're authorized the expansion for us good to know thank you board member hart wells and then board member beckman first thank you doctor hoggie out for and dr garan
143for spending quite a bit of time answering questions of the last few days that we've sent to you and being responsive and prompt in doing so and on the toolbox so there were two there's the reading writing and then the math because the pricing is for the enrollment total student enrollment are all the teachers going to have access to those toolkits regardless of the number of students license individual licenses my understanding is yes it's the teacher toolbox and so that's how it's priced miscellaneous are you able to give confirmation on that teacher being able to use the toolbox yes absolutely so the toolbox every single teacher in that site has access to all the kindergarten through eighth grade content for reading math and on writing is available for grades two through five so what that
144will allow us a teacher to do is really provide differentiated instruction not just for the kids who are below grade level but also for your advanced learners so everything is kind of back mapped so if for example the the diagnostics says we recommend that you use lesson grade four lesson seven they'll go to that lesson and actually if the students are struggling it will actually tell them to pull the previous grade level but every single teacher will have access to all kindergarten through 8th grade content so they basically is like a very sophisticated filing cabinet of resources to for teachers to truly be able to differentiate down and up thank you are the teacher so let's say there's a one of the schools has 18 individual licenses rather than a site license and what you
145just said applies in both scenarios that is correct so personalized learning would be for those 18 students but the cool box will be for every single teacher to go in there and find resources to be able to support their their students okay um thank you i also had a question about funding sources and i had asked this before and i don't think i came across with enough clarity so i will ask it again and that is there were three funding sources on the consent agenda cited district results-based funding site result-based funding and then esser funds which we have we now know a number and that number is is a lot higher i'm guessing than the sites results-based funding and my understanding is there's not really a formula of say x percent cost share is coming
146out of esser funds for all sites and or individual licenses um and there's quite a variation in how the funding will be subsidized or not subsidized to a site and can you think of any reason why we wouldn't just use s or funding for all of it honestly i cannot i think that for us our purpose is to get these resources to the sites and so the blended funds or single funds are a gift regardless and so we're open to whatever it is you approve and to work closely with ms crocher to make sure that we have all those funds that we need for the purpose we know that we have the funding it's just a matter of really outlining where it fits best fair enough um ms crozier is do you have a can
147you think of a reason why ezra funding as a sole funding source for this i-ready expansion couldn't be used and if we need to consider this later okay i just that was really where i was going with my questions before and again i don't think i was completely clear about that so esther funds could be used for it the only thing with us or is that it only lasts for a certain amount of time we would have this for several years um we are looking at all of our programs and and where are the best ways to fund it by approving it through different funds it gives us more options so if we needed to we could use we do have a lot of results-based funding at the school sites and within the district so
148it is a resource that we could use but any one of them we could we could do it all through esser either way is okay but this gives us the option if we need to use other resources thank you and i i just want to clarify this is a one-year annual subscription this is and the sr funding is beyond one year yeah you're they're doing the one year so yeah we could absolutely take the whole thing out of us or if that's what we wanted to do thank you thank you and i just wanted to add when i think of the rationale behind both of these funding sources results-based funding of course is to duplicate what's working and we see this working at the middle school level and at some sites that have piloted it
149and when we have a grassroots effort from teachers and leaders asking for something to me that is a perfect fit for results-based funding on the other hand esser is extremely appropriate as well because we need to be responsive in our teaching and really help our students grow in response to what has happened the past year and a half so i think it's a win-win either way we go okay fair enough i just wonder if it didn't have a bit of a chilling effect and i don't know if this is true or not not leading with ezr funding will cover the totality of the cost would there be more schools uh interested and maybe not and maybe not i i don't know something that you know if you have or if you don't we opened it
150up and said who is interested and those schools those administrators that felt that it was added value to what they already have came forward we just knew that the funding was there and i also want to give kudos to our administrators because they value this so much that they were willing to put their own results-based fund and prioritize differently because they really want to have something that's going to allow them to see the growth of their students and help them with progress monitoring and this provides that and the instruction instructional lessons that are needed to really come through with the differentiation yeah and i i'm sure there's reasons why the schools that are on the list are on the list and i applaud that but they had to make a decision to reallocate funds to
151this project and away from something else possibly so just thinking about how i would make that decision you have to make a value judgment and i wonder if there might have been other schools that would have participated if that were something that was put out there but i'll leave it at that thank you thank you thank you board member beckman aye yes um board member hart wells talked spoke to a few of my questions with regarding the funding and i agree that i think that results based funding is really important to each of our sites and the sr funding coming through and providing that additional really i think may have been an attractive place to seek funding from for each of these schools my other question was which i think you may have answered there
152was quite a few questions with regard to this uh did we look at it i know you you negotiated the fees but is there a competitive diagnostic out there that does something like this that is less expensive we currently work with our fast bridge for a screener what makes iready extremely unique is that they tie those outcomes to lessons where it allows our teachers to be able to take a student in a certain path in a timely fashion so this gives us again the reason why this surface so quickly is because our principals were the ones that said we found something that's really going to support us but i think that it's also important to us to continue to see what can fastbridge continue to do for us and with ireti it also helps our
153teachers to look at that differentiated path so we because it wasn't an adoption or it wasn't anything formal we have not intimately looked at other details with the other assessments that exist we've tried a few in the past here at susd that have not stuck the landing like this has and have not been utilized in the way that this has been utilized at the sites we wanted to make sure that we had a systematic approach and we knew many principles were coming to me and saying this is what i want result space for this is what i want to do and so we knew that we needed to collaborate with our teaching and learning and assessment department so that we create a consistent approach to a diagnostic that is just very much needed for our
154elementary students both in ela but in math most importantly because we just didn't have something with consistency that we could rely on for progress monitoring okay so to be clear we have had things in the past that weren't quite what we were looking for this came along it is what we're looking for it checks every box and because of that we didn't move forward and look for anything that was exactly like it to see if something was less expensive out there we're happy with this because the principles that we're using we're requesting it okay thank you can i add to that though yeah so the commitment that we're making with this one-year recommendation is that that analysis is what we'll be doing in this coming year okay to really ask and answer that question so
155we had districts that or disk buildings that that chose to use i ready before it got to a level where it needed to get board approved and so you had kiva using it you had pueblo using it we did it as a part of our math adoption so we're now at the at the point where it's sort of had organic growth we've seen benefits from that we have the resources to support it but we need absolutely need to ask and answer the question you just put in front of us and that is we need to look at the entire landscape to say is this truly the best is it the best return on investment or are there other tools that we should be considering and that's a part of the commitment that we're making for
156this coming school year okay and if i can just add to that i have used other diagnostics in the past such as nwa map and then star reading and star math both are diagnostics none has come to first of all user friendly like this is and also came with an intervention that was tied right into their performance on the assessment the work from those companies and those assessments we had to take the data we had to make instructional ladders we called it to decide what skills needed to be taught based upon the performance so it was much more labor-intensive and it was very cumbersome and time-consuming for those teachers so out of the three that are pretty well known i already in my opinion has provided the best is user friendly giving us the information
157and allowing us to really target the deficits or the strengths of each student okay i have one last question that ties to that and i thank you for that principal spring goal i really do you're giving a lot of kind of color to this proposal and so with regard to what dr menzel just said we're using this potentially for a year looking at it um seeing if it fits for us if uh at the end of the year kind of assessing whether we want to continue forward with that and make a recommendation whether there are other tools out there or things that we would rather use so my question is a little bit difficult in that is this proposal and the cost associated with it for this year something that is so expensive because the
158projection is that you would get value out beyond the year if that makes sense and so at the end of the year if we decide it is not the best fit which i have every hope and intention that it would be are we going to be back at the drawing board paying just as much for something else and really shooting ourselves in the foot this year because we paid a lot of money for something that was supposed to have lasted longer and that's why we paid so much for it does that make sense so that's my question i think i can do that okay that is a really good question president beckman and and i am a believer in pilots and grassroots efforts this district and other districts have bought district-wide tier 2 programming to
159the tune of up to 500 000 for every school and we all know the best programming it could be as as good as greatest sliced bread but when it's given and you need to do this and this is why buy-in isn't there it's difficult this is came from schools that have already been using it for a couple years now so that is why and dr hagio and i were trying to scale it down because we knew the cost was was a lot so like how about you wait for phase two and and and we just didn't really have very many takers so that is why i'm confident that this is a solid decision for us because i believe in in our teachers and our leaders just from my experience as a principal uh so much
160of this work like miss bengal i don't want to age myself but had to be done just just effort but teacher work hours and now we're working smarter these tools are here when we know that there's deficits so it's it's exciting to see that the workload is lessened for teachers and we can still get great results okay i'm going to really consider the benefit of that fact that has been used for a couple of years previously when i consider the risk reward here with regard to the cost for one year just realizing as a board member that it goes back beyond the one the when we end this year that we will be looking at potentially a period that is much greater than the one year so i appreciate your commentary on it thank you
161vice president zanowski if i may request a principal's point of view on the time commitment to train the staff and also time on assessment for students because you can anyone can pull up our assessment calendar as a district and see it's four pages long so something's got to give because teachers want to teach so that that's what i'd like to understand have a better understanding of that so thank you vice president zanowski in terms of the professional development that was part of that dollar amount so our partners at curriculum associates which is the umbrella company of i ready you know and i'm always a little skeptical but because at the end of the day they're sales people but their customer service has been above and beyond even apart from the pd that was attached so
162for us we were in our pilot year this year at redfield we had three and if i'm wrong i will go back and correct the record if not more three professional development opportunities with them as a staff it was all virtual this year of course where the teachers not only had to get some buy-in but to really learn how does this work for me as if i'm classroom teacher how does this help me this is we're not replacing tier one first best instruction how am i able to use the state especially as it relates to the toolkit in the toolbox of how can i look at little sally if she has a deficit or need some enrichment and use that tool so that that pd piece was also being able to contact iready staff to
163say hey i'm reading this data can you help me analyze this not just on the holistic kind of uh broad picture that maybe isn't by student our students but okay contact them and say hey i'm looking at this number this number isn't i gave the diagnostics you know we have we give the diagnostic three times and i'm not reading this number right can you help me understand it as it relates to the child's growth as it relates to their growth as compared to other people since it is norm reference um so it wasn't we we tied it into our staff meeting so we didn't have um it wasn't above and beyond whatever we already had planned in our calendar which we're planning we're planning now right so all the principals are planning their pd calendars
164for for the next year and how does that fit in because once you give the pd it's not enough in i think in our district we've gotten really good at not doing those one-offs we we give the pd then we analyze and say how are you using it in practice and i'll tell you i've had teachers who were a little hesitant and now are saying when can i get my hands on the i ready data as a complex in desert mountain learning community we made the commitment to all use it and to all pool our resources to make sure if xyz school didn't have the results based funding we all said we're going to pull our money our complex money that we had allocated to support those students i already had our feeder schools saying
165when can i see the fifth grade diagnostic and the fifth grade assessment data so we're not just looking at azmerit we're not just looking at what a teacher saw on us especially this past year that snapshot wasn't a pervasive view of a child's true ability of what they knew and were able to do as a result of their instruction so again and i was and i think i shared this with dr hartwells when she came to visit redfield i was hesitant especially after seeing that sticker shock from going from a pilot to the full price but after looking at the data it was eye-opening as we compare it to students around the country and around the other normed group but to see the kids and again not to belabor the point but during our safe
166place to learn time each wednesday i was able to supervise the students and that was the first thing we started with was i ready and to see the kids follow their path and follow for the students who would fall into that category who had access to the path this year and to see their their progress to see kids who were hesitant to have that productive struggle who were hesitant to see mrs bona look i i met my goal or look at my progress um so again i i think that speaks volumes to maybe something we wouldn't necessarily see on paper or a brochure for the product uh but that pd is something going back to the pdp to answer your question was already authentically embedded into our our year did that help answer thank you
167yes can you um quickly address like how long a student would spend on it depends so the diagnostic because it is based on what they know and are able to do if they can't if the answer if the question gets too hard it goes back a minute so when a child now the diagnostic will only pertain and doctor hockey got and our friend in the cloud correct me if i'm wrong for those students so if you see if if i think we alluded to desert canyon having 18 those 18 students are the ones who will have access to that data who have access to those resources the toolkits for everybody those teachers have access to all that data but the diagnostic can take as long as it takes and i know that's a horrible answer
168but a student can rush through it but even then they really can't rush through it because if they get it wrong the test is intuitive enough to go oh i have to ask you something else now to get a true sense of what you know and are really able to do um but on a whole what would you say um 45 i was going to say 45 minutes to an hour okay thank you board member lindsey yeah did you make clear to the schools the principles that this may only be a one year program before they added it yes and i see on here with the individual student licenses that all of the schools the district is taking care of it um they're kind of dangling to carrot to get them to do it no
169so we it dr hart wells brought it up as well so there was different we have the funds were a unified district um but if we came to you and said we would like to get i ready and it's however much 350 000 and it would seem very top-down and district driven and so that's that's not how it evolved it evolved from sites coming to us using their own money in their sites to say this is and that's that's always been true in in this district that we honor site autonomy in regards we all use the curriculum where all standards aligned but buildings have different needs and so they choose programs that are responsive to their students needs and that teachers believe are important and so once we had all that commitment it became apparent
170that we had to organize it for fiscal responsibility to provide support and such a large scale so then we thought well we could just pay for it but again this is a tier 2 site program not district mandated so we thought how about looking at our fast bridge data we can look at all the students identified as some risk or high risk those are students that would really benefit from this tier two intervention using the diagnostic and designing the toolbox around that so we thought that would be a place to start to have district support funding support and you'll see some schools didn't need a lot of licenses others needed more and so that was a way that we tried to balance it but we certainly could just shift it over to sr funds if
171we needed to and do you think these schools would have added this if they had to pay for it well they already have they already have so this is sort of additional results-based funding so i believe so we just we kept feeling the the pressure and the the urgency and please just let us do this on our own if if we're not going to do this as a unified proposal but then of course it it exceeded the threshold for when we need board approval so they were purchasing it on their own and then we we're at this point now are you worried at all that teachers will use the adaptive learning path from the program instead of using the data to form teacher-led small group with students so that is always a worry there is
172always fidelity concerns when implementing any program and we are so lucky to have amazing instructional coaches in susd and we just hired a new director of teaching and learning who knows so many of our coaches so we're going to need to decide what we're going to be tied on what are the district expectations in adopting this program so that we can compare apples to apples to understand how it's working we're also not going to use the i-ready assessment to determine program effectiveness we're going to use a second a separate assessment the fafsbridge screener which is like and i think dr hockey got gave me this analogy it really helped me the fast bridge screener is a checkup this is iready is when you go to the specialist and you get something very specific to you
173so we will use the fastback screener to evaluate how it's going without losing that site autonomy in regards to something so we'll determine we'll develop a curriculum group i've talked to diane murphy and donna dempsey and we need to do this with our tier one and tier two to become more unified on what we're tight on and requiring as a district and what we're loose on that site autonomy is very appropriate for will all teachers have to get the pd if they have access to the teacher toolbox they will need the pd yes and they they typically do it as a school and we are going to um continue to recommend that they use the the staff professional development early release days the time allocated before school starts um to work smarter with the when
174did you start considering expanding this like how long ago dr hockey got she kept telling me about it so this started late march early april when i started to get the interest and so i put together an input feedback form to be able to understand what the need was and how we could support it and so then we had another opportunity to come back and say there is high level of interest so we're looking at the district to be able to support with the tier two intervention resource support what i was very key in doing was making sure that everyone that wanted an opportunity to would have that to have the eye ready and if they didn't there was no judgment on anybody's part they just were doing things differently at their site or had
175other resources that would help them achieve the same goal to support tier 2 and beyond and so it would have started back in april or so i was looking back in my notes at our meetings when teaching and learning was coming to talk to us about some of the opportunities but i'm very you know proud to say that anyone that wanted it we paid close attention um those that did not we respected their interest on their site because it was born from the sites i just get conflicted because we just approved fast bridge expansion and we haven't started that in fourth and fifth grade and we're gonna ask our teachers to do pd on that and do this new program we don't know how it's gonna work and then we're also expanding i ready they're
176going to have to take pd to do the teacher toolbox there was no vetting committee process for the i ready aspect so yeah and again you know as we shared earlier this was something that we were able to see growing at the sites and what we didn't want is to do an after the fact because the sites were moving quickly in their direction of bringing this resource and i rather come to you at the front end saying this is what the interest is instead of at the back end this is how much we spent and you weren't a part of the discussion or the process and so we didn't want it to get away from a district supported assessment and instructional tools last question can we say here that we're not going to have assessments
177like you know fastbridge has to do three times a year i ready three times a year are they going to be happening at the same time the the principals have done a really nice job to fit it in as it makes sense for the site and what i mean by that i'm going to put my principal hat on we would start with the screener every year when i was at the principalship and then we would use our diagnostic tool to look at progress monitoring and see where are kids still deficient and so we would use it with some kids more often than others but it was really based on specific skills and we were able to move our students forward depending on their deficiencies so where it's really hard for me to say well no
178it's just not going to be done this way because our principles are the ones that are seeing where is the need and who do we need to bring back for that checkup um as i share with dr garan you know our fast bridge is really good to be our general doctor and then i ready will tell us if we're needing a lung check or a heart check or if it's just a little twist on a little finger can i jump in board member lindsay i really appreciate some of your comments because we we can't have redundancy redundancy redundancy so i just thought it was important to mention and dr bachna is in the cloud that she has an assessment committee that involves all stakeholders including parents and we're really looking at streamlining the assessments we
179have and some people are really attached to some of our assessments because they use them so we're looking at moving many of them into the optional category so that the teachers that use them that are tried and true to inform instruction such as some of the benchmarks they still have access and support to them but they're not required so we're scaling that back and really focusing on national norms snapshots that will give us the information we need the other point about the professional development and most of these schools are not new i-ready users so they have done most of you know the hard lift of the initial use a majority of them are already using it it's just it's gotten so big that's why we're here so that's i think an important point and so
180we will work really hard not to just keep adding more to the plate the other thing about the i-ready assessment is you don't have to give it to every student so if i have 19 licenses i can give the assessment to those 19 kids because the fast bridge screener identified them and i need to know more so there's a ton of site autonomy on how to use this tool and it is very controlled based on what you're trying to accomplish so we're going to really focus our support on that on how are you using it why are using using it don't just give every test under the sun so that's our new direction because i think you made some really strong points thank you yeah are there any other questions or comments i have a
181couple and i apologize for this so when i was looking at the tool and reading through the materials that i already provided us as to how the dashboard works my understanding is that the targeted the target growth is established by averaging the growth of all users of i-ready across the united states is that accurate someone's going to be able to speak to that better it's going to be our eye ready enos are you up there in the cloud i keep looking up as if she's going to come down [Laughter] yes can you hear me yes so that's a great question so first of all i ready is both norm and criterion but we are what we call criterion first so i'm going to spend just a second explaining that and then i'll address your questions
182sir so one of the things we know also is that when we say 50th percentile norm unfortunately across the u.s 50th percentile norm is no longer on grade level and for its already sometimes at grade level behind so teachers in the platform will be able to see both norm and grade level equivalency which is criterion so having that data point is very important so when we calculate when we calculate the student's growth we do two types of growth we do what we call typical growth typical growth is based on observed data and it's what typically a child would learn by the end of the school year sometimes typical growth may not be enough to get a student on grade level or if you had an advanced learner and it may not be enough to keep
183them advanced so every child gets their own typical and stretch growth so that stretch growth is a more ambitious yet attainable but it will allow us to get the students more toward angry level success so that's how those two growth targets are calculated and it's done for every student the other thing we do is we don't do averages we do means the best way i explained it is there's a book called um anyway i just forgot the name i apologize but it's about uh when they were designing uh fighter pilot uh seats they looked at the average of all the individuals who were pilots in the air force and they designed this designed to see and they realized there were a lot of accidents and when they actually had the pilot in the state the
184seat didn't fit anyone so when we think about an average because when you average you have extremities you have in that bell curve you have both ends of the expand spectrum so averages is not the best thing to do so we do the mean so we look at that student in the middle in the middle which is real student and that's how we calculate um the mean growth and so we do a lot of that explanation it's in the system but we really try not to averages in any of the data that we present to your school leaders or any paper that we write from research perspective because averages takes into consideration extremes and sometimes an average student really doesn't exist so we look for that middle student i'm sorry i'm a very big nerd
185so i get very excited about data so my apologies no i i appreciate that explanation so you mentioned criterion so when it says when we get a result that says a student is two grade levels behind behind what what is that criterion is is that something that i ready itself has determined this is what it this is what a student needs to know in eighth grade or is it based on common core or is it based on arizona state standards it is actually based on arizona state standards but we do what we call placement study so every every four years every two to three years we have what we placement setting and we invite teachers from all over the country to meet with our psychomatricians placement setting will basically we sit together as teams with
186the psychometricians and then we think about what is it a student in fifth grade but not just a student in fifth grade a student at the beginning of fifth grade at the middle of fifth grade and at the end of the fifth grade can do for every single one of these skills then we go through this exercise again very psychometrically valid uh to determine first uh placement placement level descriptors and from there that would determine if a student is below grade level not it's not just based on standards but it is based on this placement setting exercise in which teachers tell us where spin should be for beginning middle and end of year thank you i appreciate that that's very helpful when it comes to doing the assessments that are taken and i understand that
187it's ireadies that the newest aspect of i ready is to also indicate or try to predict proficiency among students on state assessments do the teachers have access to the questions that were asked and missed so for example if there's an assessment given i know that it's it it's it adjusts depending on how well a student answers a particular question and it goes from there but is there a way for a teacher to review those questions to say you know a lot of students are missing these critical skills according to i ready i want to look at the questions they asked to evaluate that and then use that for their teaching instruction to say okay you know looking at the results fifty percent of students miss these five questions we would like to go over them
188in class and explain it is that is that available to the teachers so i ready is an assessment suite so i'm going to first talk about diagnosis and i'm going to talk about standards mastery physical assessment so the diagnostic cuts about 88 000 items in the diagnostic and it is a secure item and we don't necessarily allow teachers look at the items because we don't want this to be i'm prepping for the diagnostic in any way we it's like my best knowledge is it's like going to the eye doctor you don't want anybody to help the student even though the the the chart is there we really are trying to find what is repair students need so the items are secured now what we do during training during professional development is that every teacher actually
189takes diagnostic during professional development just so they can see what it feels like what are the items and getting writing you know goes up and down so um they're very still driven so each item has different discrete items so to answer your question no not in the diagnostic standards mastery on the other hand is more what you're thinking about so standards max street is where either at the district or at this campus level or teacher level they can actually create an assessment for every single one of the a z merit standards there's a form a and a form b and then they get an item analysis that tells the teach misconceptions tells the teachers the items they've got wrong and those items they can see those items also have tech enhanced items which are more
190similar to what you will see on your state assessment and um so those teach are able to seat and use them for instruction or like why did they get it wrong let me look at this item and then there's a report at the student level that tells them hey you got you selected b b is incorrect and the student probably selected b because he only finished the first step of the problem and he forgot multiple so it gets that granular in standards mastery assessment which is awesome at that point thank you i really appreciate your explanation of those aspects i'm going to move to ask a couple questions of our administrators and then i think we have some more board questions or comments so you've uh dr hoggy got dr garen you said that the
191idea is we're going to use this expanded for one year and we're going to work after we if we approve it tonight we're going to work on establishing the key performance indicators or the goals to determine or help the committee determine whether this really is the tool we want to proceed with whether that means dropping other assessments as well if this can if they're duplicative efforts um what do you envision do you have any idea as to what those goals are i mean i again i see that they're looking to target proficiency on state assessments so is it going to do would it be something like this was 90 accurate in determining what students would be proficient is that kind of the type of granular goals that you're looking for so we're going to be
192looking at first our strategic plan is going to lead us to developing some goals for students and those are broader and they're going to get more and more narrow so of course we're looking for growth we're looking for grade level proficiency and we're looking for rate of improvement and rate of improvement is how fast we're closing the gap or how fast a student is progressing to a determined and set goal so we use diagnostics and assessments for so many reasons to determine if we're ready for state testing how we're looking at school to school program to program what's working what's not and then of course where where where really the rubber hits the road is the teacher using it to drive his or her instruction and how is the student responding to not only tier
193one but tier two we have and i'm going to talk about triangles dr sacko so don't get too excited but in some in some places we have upside down triangles which means that there's not enough students responding to the core tier one instruction so what do we do to close that gap because one year's growth every year is not going to get them to where they need to be so our goal is to look at rate of improvement to get students to be where they need to be to be that world-class learners that have every opportunity open to them so there's the broader goals and there's the specific student goals to get them progressing so that when we have our review of our assessment data every year we have more and more to celebrate because
194we're responsive to student needs and we're providing teachers the tools to respond just in time we don't want them to have to dig for the data or create everything under the sun we want to provide them the tools so they can continue to push forward with the science and the art of teaching and so we want to really give them all the tools and their tool belt to make that happen thank you and my final question and could please remind the board based on the use of iready so far what percent of our students are performing below grade level in math so is it 15 and matt and is it well i guess it's used in some english is that correct some ela he's got the report right there i want to say it was
19515 but i just wanted to give an idea of where we are wait three or below is eight percent but [Music] i apologize thank you okay two three or plus okay and that's math for what we have so far and we also have the sixth or eighth grade math data and what's exciting is we're going to be able to expand that data and the i ready mathematics information will feed into our secondary schools we know math is a real area of focus for us so to have that continuum of information is going to be something we've never had before do tools of this nature exist for other subjects where there might not be necessarily state standardized examinations but similarly normed things you know i'm trying to think language or art i guess science there's definitely
196assessments for language proficiency um typically these types of programs focus on ela mathematics that's where where the majority of it of it is thank you very much board member hart wells thank you um i think that miss salinas meant median not mean right yes um i want to follow up on principal bono's comment when i visited several of the schools in the desert mountain learning community ireti was a tool particularly the middle school elementary school several were relying on and we're finding quite a bit of value particularly under the circumstances of trying to educate children in a pandemic so i am pleased to see the administration responsive to the requests of those sites i think you're now is the time we have funding to address these kinds of pilots and it might be a bit
197provocative in terms of price tag but this is exactly why that type of funny was was sent to schools and districts and states across the country and then lastly going back to return on investment because the price tag is what it is actually and for everything that we're agreeing to fund i think you've gotten this question and that is we need to be prepared to have some kind of uh roi analysis at the end of this year at the end of this subscription before renewing is considered because the renewal will not be a foregone conclusion because this funny stream's going to end so with that i am happy to support this although i will be conditioned that the esr is the sole funding source thank you are there any further board member questions or comments
198the chair moves to approve consent agenda 11 l i ready expansion to elementary schools is there a second board member hartwell's seconds it is moved and seconded that the board approved consent agenda 11 l i ready expansion to elementary schools is there any further debate or questions vice president sinowski it was mentioned the funding source do we need to include that in our approval yes please okay i would like to propose that we use faster funds for this project does the administration take any issue with that request no we don't okay then i will propose a new motion are there any other questions or comments before i make a new motion the chair moves to approve consent agenda 11l as amended i ready expansion to elementary school with all funding to be taken from esser
199second four member hartwell's seconds it is moved and seconded to approve consent agenda 11l irae expansion to elementary schools as amended the amendment being that funding shall come from esser is there any further debate all those in favor vote i i i motion carries five zero the board will now move to action item 12a approval of 2021 2022 english language arts middle and high school supplemental book list dr menzel thank you president greenberg we do have dr garan and some of her team ready to talk about the uh the process for the supplemental book list there are four books on on the list and we'll turn it over to her okay thank you president greenberg vice president sinowski governing board members dr menzel cabinet and guests tonight i will be presenting with instructional coach paul
200becker and instructional coach stephen williamson on the supplemental books and materials update for your consideration i'd also like to thank our amazing instructional coaches joining us in the cloud lindsey gilbert megan barnes donna dempsey and laura kelly in case you have any questions on any of our supplemental materials they are the experts this this evening i'd like to review the definitions of adopted supplemental and ancillary curriculum there are so many ways to define curriculum and we need a shared agreed-upon understanding in order to categorize the curriculum very important then we will review our approval process and and i'm excited that we've made that more robust and any stakeholder can go on susd committee hub right now and sign up and express their interest for our ela novel selections or our supplemental materials selections for next
201year so that is available tonight online online right now though we will not have any meetings in july i can promise you that it's just too hot and then we'll also review our recommended materials for this evening so first our shared definitions the one that we're most familiar with is adopted text and materials this work goes through a formal adoption cycle many of you have sat through so many of these adoptions it includes committee work there are statutory regulations and timelines related to community preview of materials and it requires governing board approval so that is the one that is the most clearly defined supplemental books and novels in susd these are a set of novels both fiction and non-fiction on a reserved book list and a stakeholder process with a rubric is used we organize
202the book so that you don't read to kill a mockingbird in seventh and eighth and ninth in tenth grade just because all the teachers really love teaching that book i myself read great expectations twice in high school and i really liked it but twice i don't know about that so this is helping us to organize it someone brought up age-appropriateness this is absolutely critical with where we place these novels and how teachers present the information is also very important we look for rigor and relevance with our novels and making sure that they're relevant for our learners separate from that is supplemental materials and this is an area that has absolutely exploded with technology particularly with resources that are online so supplemental materials are materials that teaching and learning department support that we financially support as
203a school district that we provide professional development on that is used at multiple sites ancillary material is teacher selected material used to enhance instruction i might pull a primary source like the declaration of independence off the website and use it in my class and that's an ancillary material i might pull a current event article or a newspaper article and share that because that's going to enhance my lesson that's ancillary and many times what we find is teachers talk to other teachers and things expand or our coaches go to professional development and find a great tool and it expands enough that we support it as a district we provide professional development and then it bumps up to a supplemental material so there's things that are just used in the classroom and then there's things that rise
204to the level that we're going to provide training and coaching on we're not able to provide training and coaching on every single thing nor are we able to support every cool technology website under the sun because our it team has taught us about security and resources and total cost of ownership so all of this goes into play on where the resources are at i'm going to turn it over to our ela secondary coach paul becker to talk about the middle school and high school supplemental book list review thank you dr gairan so with the idea of supplemental book lists mill high school classrooms assigned novels to enhance the core curriculum these books come from the board approved supplemental book list for each grade level we will have four novels tonight three for the middle school
205and one for the high school that were proposed by teachers for recommendation next academic year the committee will review and recommend novels support the new textbook adoption that will support the units the 912 scope and sequence how this works is someone else book committees are in two groups there's one for middle school and one for high school composed of admin teachers media specialists and parents this committee meets on an as-needed basis especially when a teacher proposes a new book a parent requested review or if there's a potential level change after review by a grade level curriculum team all decisions are made through consensus using a rubric to guide this discussion so first with the middle school novels to be approved tonight recommended to pre-approve tonight there are three of them two for seventh grade and
206one for eighth grade two for seventh grade are for the insignificant events of the life of the cactus by dusty bowling percy jackson lightning thief by rick rorden and legend by marie lu for high school this is very specific to the ib program at desert mountain high high school committee wants to recommend b for vendetta was a graphic novel by alan moore for the ib program now i also want to uh to remind everybody there's always an adoption for alternate assignment or alternate text we recognize as ela teachers that text may be potentially too sensitive for some families or for some students how the process works in this case is that a student or a parent would request alternate book title from the teacher and both the teacher and the parent and the student will
207work work in partnership to work out any agreement or details so that student can demonstrate his or her proficiency with the standards with an alternate text so that's our process and i want to pass it on to steve williamson for his social science part of the presentation so this committee will focus on vetting books for 612 social science teachers that they would use in their classroom as a supplement to the susd curriculum these books would be used in their entirety in their classrooms now the list here was presented at the may 19th uh 2020 board meeting but due to covet 19 the committee did not meet during the 2021 school year the committee will final will be finalized and will meet during the 2022-21-22 school year and the committee will collaboratively develop a rubric to
208evaluate books to be added to the list then the committee will meet on an as needed basis moving forward and i think i'm sending it back to dr garan thank you and i just want to comment that the books proposed tonight are not a part of the 912 ela adoption we have put adding any novels on hold till next year and anyone signing up for that committee that's not posted online right now we will select committee members from that group and select novels so no novels have been selected from the savas curriculum that was adopted i just want to be clear on that next i want to talk about supplemental materials now supplemental materials we are really going above and beyond what is statutorily required just to provide transparency and also to manage all the
209resources and how we fund them and provide professional development so again i talked about supplemental materials their teacher teaching and learning supported district provides coaching financial support and used at multiple sites we have stakeholder recommendations the coaches vet for alignment to standards and curriculum we have a data governance agreement in so many cases because they all seem to involve technology so we need to make sure we have security with whatever resource that is we approve it through teaching and learning and provide professional development so you have the supplemental materials list provided to you and any new programs are in blue now i want to be very clear that many of these are not new to susd they are ancillary materials that have just bubbled up to the level that we think it's important to include
210them on the supplemental materials list i am ready to take any questions board member beckman okay a couple of things that you touched on first and foremost just kind of reviewing the process and how it's evolved over the years i remember when we discussed this in 2019 and the committees were potentially formed etc how this went and you can fill in the blanks if i have my memory is failing me in some areas we had many many books that were being considered and a committee you were looking at that couldn't read all of the books that were being used in the district at that time we had new books being considered that the committee was committing to reading and putting through the rubric etc and then the process beyond that so we had quite a
211few that were grandfathered in correct correct that you the team of the time suggested if any of the parents etc have an issue with any of those books going forward they should bring that forth and then it would go through the committee and the rubric again and it would be then at that point discussed whether it should stay on the list or not okay so i'm just trying to get some ground work here so at that time we had difficulty filling out the committee meaning as typical we we didn't have a lot of volunteers to be part of that committee so the question that i ask for you today because this is really going to be dependent or this is going to make a difference in how i vote is how is that committee filled
212out today what kind of parent representation do we have on that committee as far as reviewing our new books and addressing any concerns that are coming from parents so thank you for the the look back because when we first when i first brought it to the governing board two years ago it was a working list it was not a a board approved supplemental novel list that hadn't been formally done with the board in any recent years that i could come across but we did have working lists to really organize so the books weren't taught in multiple grade levels but yes absolutely if not only can a family choose a different alternative text for their child they can also submit a concern about a novel and that group will review it so we have had difficulty
213recruiting but we're having great success with this new committee hub we just we've we've done it for the assessment committee i more more than i can come up with right now the special ed task force and so just continuing to talk about it at board meetings and getting the word out and frankly i think the interest and passion not only about the curriculum but so many more people have come to the table because of kovid and gotten involved in committees voices that normally aren't at the table and we're trying to keep them at the table so my commitment is a manageable committee not too large but extremely well represented and i i'm not looking for all voices that agree certainly and the return to learn committees we did not have all voices that agreed and
214that's why we're able to come together and build consensus and build such a strong plan so we will take that same tactic with this committee i'm so excited about our new director of teaching and learning and our new ela coach is going to have a huge task ahead of him or her and so this will be inclusive it is already advertised tonight and it will be spirited and i think it's going to be a great experience and and frankly if they'd have me i'd love to participate as well i certainly have a lot of reading to do this summer so i applaud the community committee hub i mean that's been a long time coming to be honest with you but having said that so at this point we just got that up and running we
215have a proposal tonight so what you're recommending and speaking to books maybe that had been questioned in the past i don't know if there were any or whatnot we didn't really have parent representation on the committee previously i'm just asking that question no we did have we did have um two parents on the middle school committee and one parent on the high school committee out of how many well that that's how many we were able to get no i mean out of how many of uh how big of a large of a committee oh oh oh paul mr becker can you tell me how many people were on the committee just a range we have eight on the high school committee and we have about seven or eight on the middle school committee okay thank
216you for that now next question can you speak to the rubric please and and kind of let our community know the process and how these are chosen and not only chosen in general but when there is a book that may be challenged or even supplemental material that's challenged what is the process it goes through and what are you looking for when the outcome is either the book is taken off or left on absolutely so the rubric is based on a couple of criteria the first criteria is this books for literary merit the library mayor talks about theme addiction and syntax and symbolism and all the stuff that ela teachers value we want to teach our kids to analyze and ascertain the other side of that rubric is the sensitive content issues those are the issues
217that we'll come across if a student or a parent feels a concern about particular text so we don't want a book that has all sensitive content but no literary merit so we want to make sure the leary merit will justify the the potential of a sensitive content that might that a character might experience when we read the book we take that rubric and we use that rubric as we read or after we read to fill out this rubric and chart to to rank in a likert scale high degree to low degree on the particular content areas versus sensitive issues and literary merit when we come back together as a committee we use that rubric together to have that discussion to discuss the issues that might occur in a classroom if we were to teach that
218novel in class to weigh both the concerns with the sensitive content the literary merit that book has for our students for instructional purposes so that rubric is used in that conversation that's why i started from the very beginning when i brought this detention back two or three years ago that rubric drives our conversation and that rubric looks at both the areas of how the book is crafted along with how the books episodes are crafted in that book to show the sensitive content that might come across for with a particular character okay just a couple more questions and i'll open those up to the rest of the board i don't want to kind of hog the microphone here is that rubric used in all areas meaning the the book list the supplemental material the ancillary material
219how is are those rubrics different is it the same so we haven't had a review process for the supplemental materials it just hasn't come up until this year so that is going to be a new committee that we start okay so that's not one that is currently formed um and then the last question from me for now is savas you brought it up tonight that there is currently no recommendations with ru on the table currently with regard to any books or novels in the savas curriculum supplemental material correct but we do have many books in the savas library already on our supplemental book list because they have so many books to choose from right so just to to make that clear okay so we had quite a colorful public comment tonight with regard to some
220books that are currently there and i verified that they are with my own family and um i have a question about those so how are those reviewed are they just automatically there is supplemental material when we as a board approve the curriculum do those just automatically go in or they reviewed by the committee or if they're challenged by community members do then they go back through the process or how do those get put so you're talking about the books that we would potentially select next year because of the adoption well the ones that are currently on there that you just mentioned like that there is some from savas currently the right so um well first of all the alaska one is not on on the list just so you know okay the wallflower one is
221on the list for 11th grade though it hasn't been used in in recent times according to mr becker so those were all historically used and grandfathered in when we started bringing supplemental novels to the board two years ago and so um any the committee the the committee reviewed the list and grandfathered them in brought them to the board and if anyone has a concern then we vet it and then no new novels are added without going through the committee so the four that are recommended tonight separate from the adoption were recommended by classroom teachers that the committee vetted the four novels okay because i want to be sensitive to our community i don't know how you want me to handle this but all of those novels that were brought up tonight i would like to
222go through that committee process for review so i'm only aware of one that that we have but i will double check the list absolutely and they were they were talking about when you talk about savas they merged with pearson there is thousands of novel choices so you absolutely are going to find some novel choices that we're not even going to consider as a committee we're going to focus on there's different units in the curriculum and they have recommended novels that align with the themes and support i think it's also important to note that there's rarely an english class that reads more than two novels a year and in susd typically as a freshman you read romeo and juliet and one other novel so there's there's just so many choices out there and teachers many times
223stick to to what's tried and true so i think we also need to look at the list and see what do we need to retire what is not taught anymore if this one book that there is some concern about hasn't been used in 10 years or i i'm just you know guessing how many years why is it still on the list so this is enabling us to ask some some really great questions and improve our process so i'm excited about that so we will compare the novels that were brought up today i only am aware of one that is on our susd supplemental book list okay i'll let the rest of my board members ask some questions right now board member hart wells thank you dr garan so you described a process by which a
224parent or community member could lodge a concern and then a committee would vet against a rubric an existing rubric um in the past i was there because i'm a little confused on how much precedent we have with this process and how often has this committee received such a concern over novels that teachers in their professional good judgment are choosing novels for their students that they had to retire or had a concern about a concern has been lodged it goes to the committee for vetting is that a frequent so in in my two years here it hasn't happened mr becker have you received a concern that you vetted there was one concern at the middle school level that there was a tech there was a title there that had to be reviewed reviewed by the committee
225we brought the detention the parent signed fill out a form expressed her concerns regarding the title so the comedian middle school again made of admin mills media specialist teachers and parents all got together and discussed the book and recommend to stay have it stay included as part of our curriculum in the high school we have not had someone to recommend review for one of our texts as of yet thank you in the rubric by which the evaluation is done is that available to the public okay could you just remind our community where to find we can certainly post it okay would there be a reason to not post it not at all maybe we could share that that would be useful great um i'll just comment that as a reminder these are the books that
226are before us tonight that teachers have selected for literary merit right thank you are there any other questions or comments board member beckman last one so speak to summer reading choices just for one second so we've kind of talked about what the teachers have chosen necessarily as far as you know this is what we're going to do but let me when they provide that whole list of books on the summer reading choice list because i know we had an issue with one at the middle school level my kids were in middle school how are those chosen are they just taken from the grandfathered list or is it kind of i'm going to defer to paul on the summer reading list the summer reading list any book that's on the summer reading list that's formally signed
227comes from the susd book lists okay so the same process stands as far as the parental thing and then that is correct okay then this is my last question because we had this um as a concern in 2019 and i'm not sure if it's evolved um ancillary materials can you speak to ancillary materials and kind of what is the process for what's allowable not allowable etc for an educator to bring i mean we've got to allow our educators to do their job and a lot of them they all you know do it very well or we wouldn't have them here teaching our students but of course we want to have some sort of you know arms around what is brought into not brought into the classroom as far as ancillary materials can you talk about
228that process a little bit more absolutely so again our instructional coaches are so responsive and i believe it was steve stephen williamson correct me if i'm wrong is developing some guidance on selecting material and engaging in potentially difficult conversations and making sure both sides are heard if it's appropriate and aligned to the standards so we always go back to why is it appropriate to the course is it a age appropriate is it standards driven so you have to first frame it and ask yourself the question of why are you teaching it what do you hope to accomplish what are your learning objectives and if as a teacher you're going to decide to talk about a current event that could become a sensitive conversation in a high school history classroom our coaches have provided some guidance
229and we work together on how to frame that carefully so ancillary materials we rely on teacher judgment but we frame it under it has to be age-appropriate content appropriate for the class so if if you're in a physical education class or you know it it it has to be course appropriate and standards driven so that is the frame and then we also rely on teacher judgment and coaching and professional development of one another to select things that are going to enhance the curriculum and as um the country has become more divisive there has been more of a microscope on what we do in the classrooms so it's just so important that we continue to support teachers to learn and grow and selecting things that are going to meet all of these requirements but still allow
230them the creativity to bring learning to life through the magic of bringing in real real uh things that are of interest that are timely and that are meaningful to our students okay thank you i have a question for how we're handling these action items the presentation um kind of went through both action items and they hurt and so i don't know if you want to field and i don't have many more questions i promise if you want to field questions particularly for the first action item now and then the supplement i'm sure are we just kind of putting them all in right now i think you asked questions about both right no because there was an overlap in the presentation so i mean i think we can address the present they're both noticed on the
231agenda so i don't i don't think there's any issue we'll we'll prove them separately okay but yeah all right then i just have one last question with regard to the supplemental materials list and that's why i wanted to ask because that was specifically to that um please walk us through and how brain pop what's going on there with the concerns that our community had you uh the tools we're going to have going forward it's on the list right now but i want to make it clear like you said with the reading list we're not approving any books um from the savas curriculum tonight and then brain pop has been there's been some concerns raised please speak to that a bit and and i appreciate the concerns because they were valid so um we've been working
232hand in hand with brain pop and right now in the summer access is closed so it is not available to students or teachers right now in the summer we in the spring we pulled some access from students that teachers could request access if needed to some things that we thought were sensitive materials so the issue with brainpop is that it's open student access so if i'm a kindergarten student i can click on videos and watch them and when we talk about age appropriate we rely on our educators to make choices on what is age appropriate and then provide context around difficult sensitive materials and when students can just click and watch things without content and without decisions around age-appropriateness that's not a supplemental material that we can support in susd but we understand that teachers
233value a lot of this material and a majority of it is not sensitive in nature so we try to find a way through so in talking to brainpop at first they said we don't have we don't have any of the ability to filter and i think they've had concerns for more than one school district and so we have decided that we will turn brain pop back on when we have the ability to filter the content for age appropriateness and sensitivity so we can decide and this would be again a resource that's going to work through the supplemental materials group to help make decisions with a designed rubric so this will be we've used this process for the novels we haven't needed this process for supplemental materials but now we do so it we're going to
234duplicate it in that fashion and we will decide our coaches will decide help us and we will run their recommendations through the committee on what would be something that we don't teach in susd what would be something that would be on a sensitive list that a teacher could select for age appropriate and and design it in a lesson and provide context around it and what would just be open access so if we have the ability to filter that we're able to make instructional decisions that are good for kids we feel comfortable moving forward with it so that is why we have it on hold until we have the ability to do that can can we add two more things dr garan one when did the district start using brain pop and two what happened when
235we shut it down in the spring complete that's really thank you dr menzel i was very unpopular for like 24 hours by the way so um we started using brain pop and and i just answered this question june 29 10. thank you i know i emailed it to you i just couldn't remember so it's been used for a long time and it started in the library media specialist area so teachers really enjoy pulling a clip especially from history when they're when they're teaching a lesson there's a lot on health all different topics and so when we noticed some sensitive content and realized our younger learners could just even if they were in brain pop junior they could click up to brainpop which was problematic we decided to shut it down until we knew what we
236were looking at and my phone almost melted because teachers had lesson plans surrounding it and needed some of the content so because teachers needed it and wanted it i wanted to find a way through and i have to say the com the company has been responsive but we are we are moving forward carefully thank you thank you are there any other board member questions or comments uh dr garen i appreciate you taking the time to research when we adopted that the date is important in my mind because first and foremost board member beckman and i only started in january 2019 and the date is also important that we've discussed about when this process actually occurred it is a legal requirement that we go through this vetting process and approve these lists that was not done
237before when board member beckman and i joined the board and i believe it was actually president beckman at the time who who brought it onto the agenda and i think we should all thank her for that for that good work and making sure that we were legally compliant but these dates are important because these are not things that this board is just developing and putting through nor is it something that the administration is just developing and pushing through in order to establish some sort of agenda and i would like to remind certain members of our community especially one member who was a member of this very board all eight years when brain pop was being used that they approved it every single year without issue i have read this document that's been put out everywhere
238about stopping critical race theory in our schools and it is incredibly concerning as a jew it is very anti-semitic i don't appreciate it but one of the things that they specifically target is is crt being used in our schools first and foremost examine the materials your child is bringing home from school including brain pop i mean these are racist anti-semitic documents trying to dictate what is taught to our students and i think we need to be very careful about what agendas we are pushing because this board did not push any of this or implement any of this this has been going on in the district for over a decade i also don't think that it is the board's role to dictate or elected officials roles to dictate what students learn specifically in the classroom we
239do have to rely on professionals who are certified in their area to choose novels that are age appropriate to choose materials that are age-appropriate to get those vetted through the appropriate systems in our district in order to make sure that they are acceptable to use and get parent input no doubt but we can't just choose what books we like based on our political preferences or our ideologies this is about fair and open debate and discussion and as you said i mean there's of this list that we were given only one of these books is currently on our list it's not even used by our staff and hasn't been for a couple years i understand it so rather than get very upset about what may or may not be being taught in our schools follow the
240process we have complaint procedures if you believe your child is being taught something or your child feels that something they're being taught is not appropriate you can submit those complaints those will be investigated we have had students opt for different novels alternative assignments all the time i remember four or five years ago students opted not to read sherman alexie because of the recent sexual harassment allegations that have been made against him and they chose an alternative book we made that accommodation we are required to make that accommodation we are more than happy to make that accommodation but we cannot start fighting about which books to ban and which books to add based on our personal preferences this is something i really feel personally that the experts in the room the teachers the principals the parents
241who work on these committees who are in the classroom every day working with students need to need to judge for themselves i i really don't it concerns me when we get into these into these discussions you know savvis you know yes there were problems with the vetting process we know that the committee system has been weak for a long time we have a brand new administration we are working really hard to fix that i've complained about the committee system other members of the board have complained about the committee system we are working to improve it and we are improving it we're being far more transparent every single member of the strategic planning design team every single member of the curriculum team all their names are listed we have an application process we're advertising them we're
242doing everything we can to make this a better more inclusive process give us the time and opportunity to do that i mean these are really old problems that we only started addressing in 2019 so i i just want to make clear that your concerns are heard i'm worried about going down the route of banning books and we are working on the very real problems that exist structurally for for getting to these situations uh board member hart wells i just would like to thank you for being responsive and putting more structure around the process and being more inclusive in the process and i think that that's what we what we should be doing and it's what we can do i agree i think this could be a slippery slope but one way to avoid that is
243to welcome all diverse thoughts into the conversation so i want to applaud it sometimes they aren't very comfortable conversations but you know you have to have them and i think we're all better for them so thank you for those efforts thank you are there any other board member questions or comments uh a board member beckman i will just say this um if we're now moving to vote on the this action item um i'm supportive based on the following criteria that we are i will prove it based on the committee working to grow and be more inclusive that we treat the public comment tonight as a request to review those titles through the process and that we are only obviously approving the books that were presented to us tonight thank you and i would just like
244to echo board member hartwell's sentiments that i believe that a better more robust process will lead to better transparency and debate i think we all want it and we're very very fortunate to have an administration responsive to those needs so thank you i thought that was very eloquently put board member hardwells that said the chair moves to approve action item 12 a approval of 2021 2022 english language arts middle and high school supplemental book lists is there a second second vice president now sees seconds it is moved and seconded that the board approve action item 12a approval of 2021 2022 english language arts middle and high school supplemental book list is there any further debate all those in favor vote i i i the motion carries 5-0 the board will now move to action item
24512 b approval of 2021 2022 supplemental materials list is there any further discussion on this item um the one quick thing the only uh request i have dr garan is that you provide us with feedback regarding those filters as they come available before the school year starts okay thank you i would just like to make a note that i also asked about everfi which was another supplemental material some parents had asked about again that had been originally brought into this district for four to five years ago now so again before any of any of the board members were on here and i don't know if dr garren has any comments about that and i just wanted to note that that is something a teacher has to select a lesson to use in the classroom it's
246different than brainpop because it is not open access so we typically use it for financial literacy and some health lessons the usage is very small thank you very much dr garan uh board member lindsay i just want to thank dr garan for providing all the answers to parent questions last couple weeks very appreciated yeah truly thank you the chair moves to approve action item 12 b approval of 2021 2022 supplemental materials list is there a second second board member hartwell's seconds it is moved and seconded that the board approved action item 12 b approval of 2021 2022 supplemental materials list is there any further debate all those in favor vote i i the motion carries 5-0 the board will now move to action item 12c approval of adoption of cambridge university press is the core
247curriculum for ib theory of knowledge tok beginning in the 2021-2022 school year dr menzel thank you president greenberg we have a brief presentation on this topic as you recall we had we had a start and stop on this one in terms of our posting notice and uh who's going to do this presentation thankfully not me so we have mr paul becker is going to take the lead thank you paul you're welcome so with this theory of knowledge ib theory of knowledge is the class specifically for desert mountain high school for the ib program there and for starters let's talk about the overall process as we did restart on this particular adoption so with the next slide the overall process the recent revision the ib program there's a need to update materials to support the ib
248theory of knowledge class there are links here to the specific web pages to show you the process of what we went through but the committee was composed of the current theory of knowledge teacher the ib coordinator desmond high school a desert mountain high school assistant principal three parents and myself the secondary ela academic coach the parents that are part of this committee was a direct result of the committee hub so these parents were selected through that process and shows that that improvement is exactly working as designed as before we review criteria rubrics prior to the evaluation of all these materials these programs are evaluated tier one for quality alignment and instructional guides high ranking tier one programs were evaluated using rubrics based on the criteria that ib has put forth for us and the top
249three programs are selected based on those scores that presented the committee after that evaluation and then the vendors came in and gave their presentation and they were ranked again so after all of that we recommend as a committee that the cambridge university press will be this adoption selection for ib theory of knowledge for desert mountain high school and that's on the next slide uh these will include the grade level teacher materials which will include amd teacher additions two years of online access to materials and student textbooks the reason why is two years of student as two years of online access cambridge university press renews their um agreement every two years versus the seven year adoption that we go through so two years from now the committee will have to reconvene to talk about the updated
250procedures they don't continue cambridge university press or consider another adoption but that's that's a two-year cycle by them they will get student consumable workbooks uh the cambridge university press curriculum was designed by teacher practitioners of ib theory of knowledge and exam readers they have integrated reading and writing routines and professional development will be included so the total cost the adoption for the class of desert mountain high school is the price you see on your screen 16 18 1680 and that is the recommendation by our committee do i have any questions regarding this small adoption small this is very expensive remember heart wells um i have absolutely no objections to this i just simply wish to say thank you miss kampka i see you are still with us thank you she brought her pillow teasing i
251love this class if any of you wish to prime your critical thinking skills this is the class for you so i am a big fan of the international baccalaureate program and everything mrs kampka does as the coordinator of that program at desert mountain high school and i am very very pleased to see this come before us before the end of the school year so thank you and mr becker thank you for your presentation thank you board member beckman i don't have anything you did it's instagram oh vice president zanowski and aside from miss kamka we can also ask a former ib student who has taken the theory of knowledge class as well small investment for great thinking and just as a reminder we have expanded the ib program so that's great that's a great system
252and thank you very much for all the work you do and thank you for bringing this adoption to us and for using the new committee system that's wonderful that it worked out and hopefully it will continue to work for other adoptions dr mental do you have any comments i was just going to say i hope this is evidence that when we went through a process that didn't check all the boxes even though it was only for sixteen hundred and eighty dollars we did the process the right way as we made a pledge to do that after what we learned in the other curriculum adoption so i'm hoping that people will see this as a sign of our commitment thank you dr menzel the chair moves to approve action item 12c approval of adoption of cambridge
253university press is the core curriculum for ib theory of knowledge tok beginning in the 2021-2022 school year is there a second board member hartwell seconds it has moved in second to approve action item 12c as presented is there any further debate all those in favor say aye the motion carries five zero the board will now move to action item 12d approval of guaranteed maximum price one of two for rfq number 210126 construction manager at risk cmr services for kiva elementary school dr menzel thank you president greenberg i'd like to invite dennis raylor to the podium who has a very lengthy presentation related to this exciting project he's ready to answer any and all questions that you may be prepared to throw it into this evening welcome back dennis thank you thank you thank you i
254guess since you welcomed me back i i should take the time to thank everybody for the good vibes while i was uh not quite on my death bed but man it felt like it sometimes so covid was pretty rough for me but i'm glad to be back i'm glad that i have a team that i have in building services that stepped up to the plate and did the work that they did that that i normally do and i thank everybody for the well wishes along the way so thank you so much um president greenberg vice president zanowski members of the board dr menzel today we bring for you the gmp-1 for kiva as a measure of transparency typically when we do a presentation or have an item like this we will meet with board members
255separately and individually to go over this so there isn't a ton of discussion i've only got 14 slides and um i'm kidding we're gonna we're gonna try and get through this right away when we took the break i told the guys well i'm looking at this we got these many items we'll be done by eight guys so we've got tom o'neal from orca winslow and brett foster from mccarthy builders here as well if there's any any really tough questions that i can't answer as i showed you in our meeting real quickly the kiva site the this top side of the picture is the north side of the campus looking at two new parking lots a full rebuild of the campus with administration kindergarten first grade the 200 building with band music strings pe and our
256cafeteria and kitchen the 300 building with second third fourth and fifth grades and then our 400 building with pre-k special special needs and the media center so we did the typical visioning work that we've been doing for the last three schools and got plenty of great input it was a different and difficult process because we were online the entire time but we got through it i think we had some great input some great participation that committee fluctuated from about 22 to 25 people at all times participation really was pretty good um just want to show you uh for the public's benefit that might still be watching if they haven't fallen asleep by now is just a nice little visual if you were standing on the north east corner of the property this is looking at
257the what is proposed to be the new administration building and the parent drop off for the older students i'm going to try and move through this quickly i i want to respect everyone's time who's touching my stuff oh jonathan jonathan saw the bigger picture i just wanted to show the nice one let me get get him out of there so the important part you're here to approve the gmp guaranteed maximum price one of the problems that most people concern themselves with with doing two gmps is what is the end game what's that total uh that before we we process a gmp one do we know we're going to get to the budget to begin with so mccarthy's done a lot of hard work ow and the team have come together and really looked at this
258budget this streamlined budget as we we get towards the end of the bond making sure that we're getting everything we need for that campus so just kind of run through a few numbers first before i get into these numbers the school is 71 000 square feet or seventy one thousand three hundred and ten square feet with a design capacity for students of 732 kiva's current enrollment best we can tell mid covet or or maybe post covid is 569. there are four classrooms at every grade level and three multi-age cgp classrooms and a pre-k classroom pe music band all of the other amenities that any of our other schools have so our budget is currently established at 18.5 million with an additional million for adjacent ways adjacent ways for those that don't know pays for the
259driveways the bus lanes any of the egress and ingress to the property for emergency vehicles and transporting students site utilities under those areas things like that so we're at 19.5 as a budget and our most recent number came in at 19 9 88 739 tomorrow tomorrow afternoon we have a what we're calling a gut check meeting to look at that budget and see where mccarthy's at as of tomorrow and so brett didn't give me any bad news while we've been here so hopefully it doesn't give me any bad news tomorrow so we're still a little bit over budget but we're going to get there this team has been working really hard to to get there and without uh sacrificing anything in the quality of that school that's been real important for us so the numbers
260that you're looking at they've already identified their subcontractors for this early gmp work and and understand that um obviously the summer is the window to get the heavy lifting done to get the dirty work done to take care of business that we can't normally take care of or it isn't as easy to take care of during the school year so we're going to demo some buildings we've already started the asbestos abatement in those buildings and we're going to get to the to the use site utilities and start building those building pads and get it ready to go so right now our total gmp for gmp one is three million four forty two two oh four i should note that of that total 1.5 million dollars is a set aside allowance for things that we know
261are going to be in gmp 2. but with escalation with all of what's happening in the world materials not showing up ships in the suez canal customs backed up 5000 ships mccarthy thought it prudent to uh propose this to make sure that we can buy those materials early enough to hit our deadline what's our deadline the expectation is that these buildings are built and kids are moving in next august for the next school year not this august next august which is an extremely aggressive schedule so we've seen mccarthy's track record on some other projects not our projects but other projects and they can do it so they're setting themselves up and our district up for success by asking us to approve this allowance as part of the gmp one so what does that mean exactly
262well all along the way any time there's money expended we look at those dollars we being the team but most importantly the architects and their consultants it's their job to make sure the money spent where it should be spent now i've been asked to consider a third party consultant to look at those numbers and to validate them for us so we're going to do that we're going to look at that we've talked with the city of scottsdale their auditors their chief estimator they've provided us with a couple of companies that do this kind of stuff for a living and so we're going to talk with them determine the scope of work see if there's a return on investment that we can do that and feel comfortable that we're not duplicating services that we're not really
263stepping on the architect's toes because they do have a professional responsibility to do this so we'll maybe or maybe not bring that back it might just be an update coming from dr menzel to you because it may not meet the threshold to necessarily come back to the board okay so our ask at this point is the gmp of 3 million 442 294 and with that i'll leave you with the recommendation thank you or questions board member beckman just a really quick one um as you go into your meeting tomorrow we discussed this in our uh meetings that we had individually first of all welcome back thank you thank you by the way um is the five percent construction fee and paying five percent you know we talked about this yep on the library umbrella the
264builder's risk insurance performance and payment spot the sales tax paying five percent on that yeah so i would like a conversation centered around that yep i've already had it okay and we'll have it again okay but we definitely um uh tyler tyler shoop who's not here tonight as soon as i got out of the room with you we had a phone call phone conversation so it'll be discussion again okay thank you thank you board member hart wells all right thank you for um acknowledging your the diligence that's being done to um retain the performance milestone contra contract concept that's here right an early advance on tranche2 money needs to have some process we make sure that that's and it's not to assign a motivation to anyone it's just good due diligence ni echo board member
265beckmann's observation of the fee on top it perhaps should be on the subtotal not down on the total um so i would be interested in also hearing the outcome of that conversation yep thank you for all your hard work dennis and welcome back thank you thank you are there any other board member questions or comments uh dennis i just want to thank you again for meeting with us on the two by two by ones those are very helpful for the board it allows us to ask quite a lot of questions in a detailed manner that is not so time consuming and i also want to thank you and your department for working with the city of scottsdale's auditors in improving the bond process and improving all the work that we do because anything we can
266do to protect taxpayer money and be transparent there is a benefit to our students and it's a benefit to our community so thank you very much welcome are there any further comments or questions the chair moves to approve action item 12d approval of guaranteed maximum price one of two for rfq number 210126 construction manager at risk cmr services for kiva elementary school is there a second second vice president zanowski seconds it has moved in second to approve action item 12 d as presented is there any further debate all those in favor say aye aye the motion carries five zero thank you the board will now move to action item 12e do you have any comments dr mental apologies uh we'll now move to action item 12e second read of proposed revisions to governing board policy
267die audits financial monitoring dr menzel thank you president greenberg i want to turn the microphone over to jennifer mclennan who's worked very closely with a couple of our governing board members and sharon walker from the city on these proposed revisions but before letting her speak i also want to thank her for filling in as general counsel in-house for us since michelle marshall left we really appreciate the work that you've done president greenberg members of the board dr menzel thank you very much for those kind words and thank you to the amazing gladys as well the governing board uh policy committee had considered uh governing board policy die we had a first read two weeks ago we this being presented for a second read since the time of the first read on june 8th board member
268hart wells has submitted comments which are included in the the blacklined version that you are viewing here we also met in a two member with board with myself and with sharon walker of the city of scottsdale she was very instrumental and helpful in explaining some of the city's policies and procedures with respect to creating and auditing and financial policy so and in addition to the corrections that you see up there dr hart wells and her careful read has found one additional typo that we've corrected so i would present this to you for your discussion happy to elaborate on some of the finer points which are also outlined in the agenda item if you'd like me to thank you very much are there any questions or comments board member hart wells i simply wish to say
269thank you for tolerating my careful reads i appreciate that for being opened in the discussion i and actually miss walker was very helpful uh in terms of her proficiency in her experience and competency to help develop this policy and feel very confident that this was this was done in a very professional manner so and thank you miss mclennan for your lead on this and president greenberg for your lead once thank you very much and i just reiterate that i appreciate everyone taking the time to meet uh last last week was it gosh time flies it's all a blur and miss walker was fantastic it was it was great that she would take the time out of her very busy schedule to meet with us and go over that my personal view would be that approving
270the policy as revised is appropriate the only change the only revision i'm i would personally advise against and i'll let or remember hartwell speak to this is there's a change on the top of page four the very first paragraph um one of the abilities that is generally given to a district auditor or city auditor is the ability to initiate spontaneous audits without a committee or superintendent board approval it's used rarely the main reason for it is if there's a specific allegation of wrongdoing that involves personnel if they report it to the committee or have to get board approval it becomes a public record before there's been any initial investigation to see whether there's there's any standing there or any reason to move forward so in general you would allow a district auditor or a city
271auditor or any your chief audit executive to initiate those spontaneous investigations and you would have to rely on their professional competency to carry those out and have discretion not to abuse their rights under the policy i will remind people that these are professionals they are professionally certified if the district were to ever hire one the main reason for getting this policy done is to initiate the district auditing committee process which is included in here that formation the committee but two or three years down the road to board member hartwell's point about getting it right if we're going to put it on the books at all i think you know these people are assessed and evaluated by independent third parties based on peer reviews that are done they're also subject to their own professional certification so
272i think all of the changes in here that board member hart wells working with us has suggested are great the only change would be not to remove the spontaneous initiate spontaneous initiation of of audits when necessary so that's that's my only caveat to the changes made i don't know if anyone oh board remember hartwells i wanted to explain my reasoning for requesting it to be removed and my read of it was that it could be construed as alarming to an employee if in fact the auditing component is not done in a professional manner one and two that there is no gates there's no qualification there's uh it's just hanging out there is what it could be perceived as a blank check um again not assigning a motivation to anyone i don't think someone that would
273take this job would necessarily be looking for that kind of loophole but it felt to me a bit too permissive in the language so my concern that was my concern we discussed maybe some controls around what that looks like but went with let's strike it and then talk about it so that's where we're at i instill of the opinion that it could be added later once the district auditor is hired the committee takes shape and the processes start to you know be laid throughout the district and the organization if if warranted are there any questions or comments or is this just a very esoteric debate [Laughter] a board member board member backman i i guess this question is for you since we have a two sides kind of making very um rational points with regard
274to the use of that word uh you know the very reason for hiring an auditor is obvious to most professional organizations clearly uh you know specifically in scottsdale unified we've had a storied history of needing an auditor and there were moments years ago where a spontaneous audit could have been quite beneficial and i think i'm just curious if that kind of precipitated partially your rationale for wanting to keep that in there not necessarily a specific instance but an environment where something like that may be needed it is certainly and i think you know board member hartwells makes a very good point what are the checks and balances if we hire somebody who does start to abuse their discretion and i think because of the dual reporting system they report daily of course to the superintendent
275and provide updates and of course the superintendent also has to keep an eye out on the interaction between the internal auditor and people we could have a great internal auditor but if he or she or they are abusive of other you know great i mean competent in terms of work but if from a social side are abusive to staff well we couldn't keep working with that individual and so we have that side with dr menzel providing that input of saying there have been concerns here the issue that uh ms walker pointed out is that there really aren't any gateways because the main issue is if you do that spontaneous thing you don't want to name publicly what you might be looking into if it ties directly to an individual so if i call up and
276i say i i'm concerned that john michael greenberg is misappropriating district funds and here's how i believe he is doing it you might not want to publicize that unless you find grounds that that might actually be happening because otherwise if you just go to the board and say there's this new audit and it would be investigating mr greenberg while i could then go and start destroying documents or i could go and do other things that halted or i could push for the firing of the internal auditor so if there's there's and at the same time you're protecting the individual's reputation in case there is absolutely no basis for those claims it was a concern it was reported it wasn't there so yes i mean it prevents somebody from from being notified that they're being potentially
277investigated and destroying information documents um but there is of course always a side of what are the checks and balances is this person just going after individuals they don't like or have had run-ins with i don't again i think the the checks and balances are their professional qualifications are on the line and it will be found out you know probably pretty quickly if it turns out that hey why are you requesting all these documents about this person and so on i think they would have to at some point bring it to the board if there's some foundation for their their investigation oh yeah [Music] dr menzel so i i two things strike me in the conversation one it's the next part of the clause that says deemed necessary and so what's the threshold for deeming
278something necessary under the the the idea here with an audit committee is that we have an audit work plan so then what would be um and rise to the level that we would deviate from the audit work plan in order to investigate something else spontaneously so so i would say that the spontaneous part doesn't cause me as much concern as what's the threshold for deemed necessary because there could be i think about our curriculum adoption for sixteen hundred dollars that's pretty small and and should we take ourselves off of a course of action that's been planned based on other risk factors that have been taken into consideration what's the threshold and if we had clarity around what the threshold is for deemed necessary that might help alleviate some of the concerns may i make a
279proposal my why don't we approve it as amended here i think it can actually probably be dealt with by the audit committee itself and setting out parameters of miscellaneous audits and that committee can set out the specifics as to when certain other audits may be conducted i.e if there's just direct allegation of illegality would that be would that be maybe an appropriate action just so that we can i'm cognizant of time i'm also cognizant that we do want to get this done and board member hardballs does make a good point that we can amend this in the future if we really need to um i appreciate that compromise and i don't believe that it takes it off the table the document the policy does contemplate the charter for the audit committee which the audit committee
280when formed will establish and to dr menzel's point those types of terms could have a bit more teeth around and dfinity and structure to trigger certain parties involved and i'm very comfortable with that purpose good compromise good teamwork are there any additional questions or comments jennifer would i be moving to approve it policy die as i would i would say as presented in the second read perfect as presented in second read thank you very much the chair moves to approve action item e second read of proposed revisions to governing board policy die audits financial monitoring as proposed during the second read is there a second board member hartwell seconds it is moved and seconded to approve action item 12 e second read of proposed revisions to governing board policy die audits financial monitoring as proposed
281during the second read is there any further debate all those in favor say aye aye the motion carries 5-0 the board will now move to action item 12 f approval of vision mission and core values dr menzel thank you president greenberg vice president sinowski members of the governing board and those in the audience who are still with us this evening earlier tonight we had a presentation by dr connie cam outlining the process that we've gone through to get to a point of bringing forward to the governing board recommended vision mission and value statements for scotland unified school district i think if we thought about these only in isolation there could be a lot of different questions and i'm hopeful that the way connie presented the information tonight in terms of where we're going and what
282it really means to provide and engage all students in world-class future focused learning really sets a tone for how we ensure that every student in scottsdale unified school district is prepared to be successful when they leave our school system and so with that i'm happy to answer any questions talk about any specific things that might have surfaced but this is the recommendation from the strategic planning design committee and i support it thank you dr menzel are there any questions comments or concerns about this proposal vice president zanowski i just want to add that i love this work i love the outcome this is where we need to be to be aspirational for students and staff thank you vice president zanowski are there any other questions comments or concerns about the proposal or the process i
283would just like to thank dr menzel and dr cam and all 40 members of the committee for working very hard on this and to the governing board for giving us this opportunity to start this process it really couldn't have been done without the five people on the sport the administration and the wonderful community engagement we've had with it and you know i think i had a parent come up to me after the public comments section with a number of comments but i will just say this that when we talk about inclusion we do mean inclusion of all and that means politically conservative voices as well as liberal voices that means the lgbt community able-bodied persons disabled person special education accessibility for all we we're not talking about excluding anyone here we want this to be
284a place that students and parents and staff feel is a home away from home and a great place to learn board member hart wells thank you so i had i had actually prepared a little bit of a um a historical lesson to tie into all of the words that are in this document um tied to albert einstein so um i'm not i'm going to read that 10 pages to you know i'm teasing it i'm not i'm going to it's actually quite interesting i think it's interesting photoelectric effect is cool [Laughter] i will say that just about everything every word in this document resonates with me in large part because i believe that it is our highest ideals in action and i am excited to see what the opera operation component of this dr kim alluded
285to earlier and i understand what is before us here really is ultimately an aspirational goal to establish the scottsdale unified school district as a world-class education community and i will just say i am in i am all in so in closing i want to also thank the strategic plan design committee members who have volunteered selflessly their time to think critically to act collaboratively and to embrace a diversity of thought all in the service of their community i think thank you remember hart wells very well set are there any other questions or comments the chair moves to approve action item 12 f approval of vision mission and core values is there a second second vice president sunowski seconds it is moved and seconded to approve action item 12f approval of vision mission and core values is
286there any further debate all those in favor say aye aye the i the motion carries 5-0 the board will now move to agenda item 16 future items board members may propose topics for future consideration do any board members have any future topics they would like for future consideration board member hart wells uh yes so anticipation of the ex-berry of the iia with the city of scottsdale police department i would like to consider the right path is to ask dr menzel to form a committee to explore and revisit the substance of the collaboration so that the discussions can start to inform appropriate amendments that update the iia and embrace the realities of our current challenges with social and emotional health and more contemporary tools that are now available to address those challenges and i will cite
287deputy rocket as one example of one of those tools and and i'll just remind everyone that that ia renews in just a little less than a year now and when chief walther was here he i believe i understood him to be more keen on starting the conversation sooner than later and i will ask for your uh feedback dr minzon whether you think that should be a kind of delegation so that it's a committee within the leadership team or if that's something that you want a member of or that we feel a member or two of the board should be included so that is a discussion but i would like to ask that that those efforts start now thank you board member beckman yeah just i would like to have a further discussion about something that
288we've initially started which is the sports academy at saguaro high school thank you very much are there any other board members who have future items for consideration thank you very much the board will now move to agenda item 17 dates of upcoming meetings our next meeting will be tuesday august 10th 2021 at 6 pm that is a special governing board meeting hosted at the mda and the following meeting will be tuesday august 24th at 2021 at 6 p.m that is a regular governing board meeting held at coronado high school here in this room we will now move to agenda item 18 governing board reports do any board members have anything to report board member hart wells last time i actually wish to thank our kind-hearted officer steele and our sros who extended an invitation to
289the board members to participate in the teen academy that's hosted by the city of scottsdale's police and fire department and so board member stanosky and i attended a morning session they put us through our paces we got to fight zombies it was very cool some of our susd students were there alongside us so thank you for allowing us that opportunity it was really cool actually and i also had the pleasure of participating in a day at camp invention at laguna elementary school and i loved it and i know several of the schools around the district are also doing camp inventions it was really really exciting to see the kindergartners actually made solar-powered um crickets jumping across little rivers i mean solar cars battery powered cars i thought that was outstanding and i appreciate the teachers
290at laguna allowing me to join them that day thank you board member or vice president zanowski yes in addition to our training together which was a lot of fun i've had the privilege of working with some community individuals and we will continue our work this week board member beckman will will join us with that and that is to develop and design a civics symposium for all of our high school students so i really look forward to that opportunity of working together on that thank you are there any other board member reports board member lindsey i just want to thank the eld department at coronado they gave us these this book of lives on the page from the coronado high school eld students and it was really touching great stories great pictures so thank you are
291there any other board member reports well i would just say that we have been working very hard for the past six months and it has been a pleasure as we move into the break for the next month and a half to have been working with all all four of you and our administrative team i think we've accomplished a lot in a very short period of time and i don't think we could have i don't think we could be where we are today looking at the future looking at how to improve academic outcomes how to improve educational opportunities for students we're not for the work that you all do and the hard work you put in every day for preparing for meetings attending school visits attending school events so i really appreciate it and i look
292forward to many more another year and a half and thank you ms mclennan for all the work you do it's a pleasure working with you and i look forward to continuing that relationship and i welcome lori byrd our new in-house council which is very exciting so lots of great changes it's been my honor and my privilege same the board will now move to a german the chair moves to adjourn this regular meeting of the scottsdale unified number 48 governing board on june 22 2021 the time is 9 37 p.m is there a second second advice uh board member backman seconds is moving second to adjourn this regular meeting of the scottsdale unified school district number 48 governing board all those in favor say aye aye aye the motion carries 5-0 and the meeting is adjourned
293you